By 1880, just two years after he had completed his training under Carolus-Duran in Paris, John Singer Sargent was in the ascendant. His skills were in growing demand for the portraits of the rich and famous, and he also took time to travel and paint abroad, mainly in Spain and Italy.

When he was in Spain in around 1880-81, he painted this Spanish Dancer.

During a visit to Italy in the period 1880-82, he painted these Venetian Glass Workers.

In early 1883, Sargent made overtures to one of the best-known young socialites in Paris, Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau, a French creole immigrant from New Orleans, who had married the French banker Pierre Gautreau. Her beauty was the talk of the town, and numerous artists had asked to paint her portrait as a means of promoting their own careers. The first request that she accepted was Sargent’s, in February 1883. She proved a reluctant sitter, and it wasn’t until June of the following year that Sargent was able to pin her down in her estate in Brittany to start preparatory studies. He didn’t complete the finished work until well into the autumn.

We can’t see his original version of Madame X, as its reception drove him to make alterations to tone down its overt eroticism. Her pose was considered sexually suggestive, and one strap of her gown had fallen down her shoulder adding to the image’s sexuality. It caused a scandal when exhibited at the Salon, and was lampooned mercilessly in the press.

Sargent sought temporary solace flirting with the fashion for Impressionism.

He had first met Claude Monet in 1876, but it’s thought that this painting of Claude Monet Painting by the Edge of a Wood was made in 1885, when they were painting together at Monet’s house in Giverny. At the right is Alice, Monet’s wife.

That year Sargent decided to move his portraiture studio away from the scandal in Paris, to London.

By 1886, Sargent had fully settled into his London studio, and the following year had established his reputation, which was reinforced when he exhibited Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose at the Royal Academy. This was bought immediately by the Tate Gallery. From then until he closed his studio in 1907, he was the leading portrait painter in London. In spite of his obvious success, he was among those who were unhappy with the Royal Academy, and was a founding member of the New English Art Club in 1886.

His uncommissioned work often took him plein air and with progressively loosening style. He visited France frequently, attended Impressionist exhibitions, and developed his friendship with Monet. His informal works were often loose bravura gatherings of marks that appear to have been painted very quickly indeed.

This is shown well in Sargent’s virtuoso Gust of Wind from about 1886-7, which compares with Claude Monet’s La Promenade from 1875.

By the end of the 1880s, his critics in England considered him an Impressionist, but Monet thought he was still under too much influence from Carolus-Duran to be considered Impressionist. His portrait business prospered: in 1887-8 he toured the US and gained over twenty important commissions, including that of Isabella Stewart Gardner, a major patron of the arts in Boston, where twenty-two of his paintings were shown in his first solo exhibition.

Sargent met Dennis Miller Bunker (1861-1890) in November 1887, during that visit to the USA, when Bunker was a rising star of American Impressionism. Like Sargent, Bunker had trained in Paris, and the two became good friends. Bunker stayed with Sargent in England in the summer of 1888, when Sargent painted him at work, in Dennis Miller Bunker Painting at Calcot. Bunker tragically died of meningitis just two years later, at the age of only 29.

Sargent painted this Morning Walk in 1888.

Paul César Helleu (1859–1927) first met Sargent when the former was a precocious student at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1876. Sargent was the first person to buy one of Helleu’s paintings, for which he paid the huge sum of a thousand francs. Helleu and his wife Alice remained close friends with Sargent, and the couple often appear in his paintings. When he painted them in An Out-of-Doors Study in about 1889, they had been married three years.

On the evening of 1 April 1890, when Sargent was back in New York, he, William Merritt Chase and the famous Spanish dancer Carmencita met in Chase’s Tenth Street studio; she danced for them, and they sketched. On this occasion, Sargent opted for a more static pose in his La Carmencita (1890), with her hands at her hips, driving her bust out and her chin high, in assertive pride.

Demand for Sargent’s portraiture skills remained high during the 1890s.

In 1895, two notable young residents of New York City married. He was Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes (1867-1944), a recent graduate of Harvard who studied architecture for three years at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Sargent’s alma mater. He went on to co-found the architectural firm of Howells & Stokes, and was a pioneer in social housing. She was Edith Minturn (1867-1937), daughter of the shipping magnate Robert Bowne Minturn, Jr., and destined to become a philanthropist, socialite, and artistic muse.

A close friend decided that a good wedding gift would be a portrait of Mrs Stokes painted by the greatest of the age, John Singer Sargent. For various reasons this was delayed, but in 1897 the artist and the couple got together and Sargent started work. His original intention had been to paint Mrs Stokes wearing formal evening dress sitting next to an Empire table. However, he changed his mind and decided to paint her standing in informal walking attire next to a Great Dane. As he was reconceiving this in his mind, he turned to a portrait that had been donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Sargent’s patron Henry Marquand in 1889: that of James Stuart, by van Dyck.

Unfortunately, Sargent was unable to find a suitable dog. Mr Stokes then “offered to assume the role of the Great Dane in the picture”, as he put it in his memoirs. The result puts Mrs Stokes in charge, as an example of ‘The New Woman,’ and her husband as a surrogate dog.

Between about 1782-85, the great French landscape painter Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes (1750–1819) built his personal library of oil sketches of the countryside around the city of Rome. He then returned to France, where he assembled them into finished paintings in his studio.

A Capriccio of Rome with the Finish of a Marathon from 1788 is a direct descendant from the pioneering landscapes of Nicolas Poussin of more than a century earlier. Groups of figures at the left and right are watching athletes run in to the finish of their race. Behind them is a town based on passages of Roman architecture, but isn’t recognisably a depiction of Rome. This is an intermediate between the completely idealised landscapes of Poussin, and later topographically accurate views.

Valenciennes then wrote up this technique of sketching in oils in front of the motif in his influential manual on landscape painting published in 1800. This remained the standard work well into the twentieth century, and was used by Impressionists including Paul Cézanne. Most budding landscape artists travelled across Europe to train in the Campagna during their formative years.

Achille Etna Michallon was one of the earlier visitors in about 1817-19, when he painted the spectacular scenery of Tivoli, shown here with a Goatherd Opposite the Falls of Tivoli. These waterfalls are more painterly than his early realism.

Michallon’s unusual View of Santa Scolastica in Subiaco from 1818 shows this famous Benedictine monastery in Subiaco, Lazio, dedicated to the sister of Saint Benedict of Nursia.

Carl Blechen studied at the Berlin Academy from 1822, then travelled to Dresden and Switzerland. After he was dismissed as a stage painter at the Royal Theatre in Berlin in 1827, he travelled first to the Baltic coast then south to Italy, where he too painted plein air in the Roman Campagna. His copious oil studies were in a similar style to those being painted in the early nineteenth century by others in the area, but back in Berlin were seen as being radically different.

Camille Corot was perhaps the first major landscape painter both to follow Valenciennes’ teaching and to show his sketches in public. During his first stay in Italy between 1825-28, he developed his skills painting outdoors in the Campagna, producing classics such as his View of the Convent of S. Onofrio on the Janiculum, Rome above, and The Bridge at Narni below.

Heinrich Bürkel’s Shepherds in the Roman Campagna from 1837 has an almost documentary quality, in the rough and dusty peasants slumped on their horses and donkeys. In the foreground a couple of ewes are looking up at their lambs being carried in a pannier, and a dog is challenging a snake by the roadside.

In 1850, the twenty-two year-old Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin moved to Rome, where he too started painting in the Campagna.

In the Alban Hills from 1851 is a fine depiction of these hills about 20 km (12 miles) south-east of the city of Rome. Unlike many artists working in the Campagna at the time, Böcklin must have painted this work in the studio from extensive sketches and studies made in front of the motif. Look closely, though, and there’s a dark figure standing beside a small smoking fire, to the left of the central mass of trees, and further to the left might be the entrance to a dark cavern.

Böcklin uses more dramatic lighting in this Roman Landscape from 1852. Its dark wood is very dark indeed, not the sort of place to enter alone. At the foot of the prominent tree at the right is what appears to be a woman undressing, as if going to bathe in the stygian gloom.

Nils Jakob Blommér’s undated Landscape from Italy is another plein air oil sketch of the Roman Campagna in the tradition of Valenciennes.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the young French Impressionists broke new ground by applying Valenciennes’ teaching to plein air sketches they made in the countryside around Paris, and on the north coast of France. They then exhibited those sketches as finished works, the working method of Impressionism.