John Singer Sargent

An American raised all over Europe who became the portrait painter everyone wanted — and then, tired of commissions, packed a folding stool and a box of watercolors and painted wherever he traveled. Alongside the grand oils and the bright, fast watercolors he kept up a third practice: quick charcoal portrait heads, sketchbooks, and hundreds of figure studies for his murals in Boston. The pieces here are in the public domain, from museums that share their collections openly — the National Gallery of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art.