John Singer Sargent is most famous for his glamorous portraits of eminent and socially prominent people of the Edwardian period. For a short while after his death his popularity declined and he was criticized for being "superficially brilliant", but today he is now recognized and acknowledged as a superb craftsman of consummate skill. He was influenced in his style by Velazquez and Frans Hals, and had a particular fondness for painting white and the play of light and shadow on this colour. An expatriate American he was wildly popular in both England and America, especially Boston where they practically lionized him, criss-crossing the Atlantic on frequent trips to carry out commissions.

Born in Florence, Italy, of well-to-do American parents, the young Sargent was raised in the cultured milieu of fashionable society, and led a nomadic life as he travelled with his parents around the Continent. He received little formal education, but his experiences and privileged background gave him a cosmopolitan polish and his paintings reflect his astute observation of people, places, and fashion. His mother, an accomplished musician and amateur artist herself, encouraged him to pursue a career in art.

He began his formal art education at the École des Beaux-Arts, and in the Paris studio of the French portraitist Carolus-Duran. He moved in the Impressionist circles and got to know most of them, became close friends with Monet, and experimented with the Impressionist style in his later years. Sargent greatly admired the work of Velazquez and in 1879 travelled to Spain to study his work at first hand. Out of this trip and exposure to Spanish art and culture came one of his greatest masterpieces, "El Jaleo". It occupies a special niche of honour at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Mrs Gardner, herself the subject of two Sargent portraits, was a supporter and patron of the painter.

When his daring portrait of Madame X in 1884 (initially the one strap of her gown was draped off her shoulder, which was considered shocking and brazen by the standards of that time. He subsequently painted the strap back in its proper place, but it took a couple of years for him to win back his prestige) scandalized the Paris Salon, he moved to England, which remained his home base the rest of his life. Sargent himself was very proud of this portrait and thought it one of his finest works. In England the author Henry James befriended him and championed his cause, and his influence and connections were instrumental in restoring Sargent to public favour; and an eminence and prestige he never again lost.

About 1907 Sargent tired of portrait painting and accepted few commissions. He then worked chiefly on European scenes in watercolor, in a notably impressionistic style. Reflecting the esteem in which he was held on both sides of the Atlantic, Sargent received honorary degrees from Cambridge and Oxford, as well as Harvard, Yale and Pennsylvania.

He died in London in 1925 of a heart-attack, aged sixty-nine.