John Singer(1856-1925) Italian-born American painter whose elegant portraits provide an enduring image of Edwardian-age society. The wealthy and privileged on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean came to his studio in London to be immortalized. John Singer achieved a great reputation for his portraits, Sargent's broad, slashing brushstrokes and brilliant palette evoke a sense of the accidental and of capturing a particular moment. He was surprisingly unrepetitive in his portraiture, responding to each sitter differently, and was masterfully able to manipulate props and painterly effects to suggest the class and sometimes the occupation of his subjects. His best portraits capture his sitters in a revealing, off-guard moment. Fashionable clients flocked to his Chelsea studio and paid, on average, 1,000 guineas, or $5,000, for a full-length portrait. Moving in the circle of the Impressionists, he came to know most of them, In the 1880s Sargent began to paint landscapes After 1910 Sargent gave up portraiture and devoted the rest of his life to painting murals and Alpine and Italian landscapes in watercolour. With stenographic brilliance Sargent pursued transparency and fluidity beyond the experiments of J.M.W. Turner and Winslow Homer, sometimes creating works that were prophetically or accidentally expressionistic, as in Mountain Fire (1895). that were Impressionist in technique and approach. At this time he visited Monet painting two portraits of him: Claude Monet Painting at the Edge of a Wood and Claude Monet in his Bateau-Atelier (1887. Sargent's painted large canvases out of doors,