American Painting and its Tradition by John C. Van Dyke

The major events in Mr. Sargent's life as we read them or hear them told to-day seem in no way striking or startling. He has moved along well-trodden paths, in a well-ordered career, responsive always to the teaching of his youth, and reflective of his social and intellectual surroundings. He did not wholly achieve art, for some of it was born to him and some of it, perhaps, was thrust upon him. He came to it early, grew up in its atmosphere, and was under its spell at an impressionable age. Which is to say that he is not a self-made painter in the Inness-Wyant sense, but something of a traditional painter in the La Farge sense. Training started him aright, but his great success is, of course, not wholly due to that. Genius alone can account for the remarkable content of his work.

He was born in Florence in 1856. His parents were Americans residing in Italy at the time of his birth. The father was from Gloucester, Massachusetts, and had studied medicine in Philadelphia, afterward remaining in the latter city to practise his profession. He had met and married a Miss Singer of an old Philadelphia family, and later they had gone to Florence to live. Legally, therefore, the painter is an American, but the legal tie is about all that binds him to us. We like to claim him because he is a celebrity, but in reality he is an American only in a nominal way. He was not reared or educated here, he has not lived here, he has not fought in our quarrels or failed in our failures or succeeded in our successes. The greater part of his life has been passed abroad amid other scenes and other peoples. As a boy he travelled about Europe with his parents, speaking German as his first acquired language, if I report him aright, and gaining the bulk of his schooling in Italy and Germany. At eighteen he went to Paris and entered the _atelier_ of Carolus Duran -- at that time perhaps the most famous of the French portrait-painters. It was not until 1876, when Sargent was twenty years old, that he saw the shores of the United States. That was his first visit. He did not stay for any length of time, and what were his impressions of the land and the people we do not know. Several times since then he has been here for short periods, but one or another of the large European capitals has been his residence. Since 1884 his permanent abiding-place has been London, though he lived for a time in Paris, and just now (1918) he is again here in America.