"Madame X," Sargent left Paris in 1886, settling permanently in London. He subsequently flourished in the English capital, becoming the leading portrait painter to the upper classes. Those who shared Sargent’s sense of refinement and sophistication, as well as his international viewpoint, were especially drawn to his fashionable French style. In addition to patronage from such prominent British families as the Wertheimers and the Marlboroughs, Sargent received an equal number of American commissions, many of them secured by artists and architects he had met during his student days in Paris, among them painters J. Carroll Beckwith and Julian Alden Weir and architect Stanford White. On a painting tour to America during 1887-1888, he portrayed members of notable families from Boston and New York, including Mrs. Jacob Wendell and Elizabeth Allen Marquand. Like their British counterparts, Sargent’s American patrons were drawn to his distinctive style. However, his solid New England ancestry also worked to his advantage, helping him to establish connections in upper class society. Interest in his work in Boston was given further impetus by a solo exhibition of his paintings at the St. Botolph Club in 1888. Two years later, Sargent became involved with the mural decorations for the Boston Public Library, a project that would occupy him until 1919. He went on to execute murals for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (1916-25) and for the Widener Library at Harvard University (1921-22). At the same time that he was moving to the forefront of portraiture, Sargent was also forging a reputation as a painter of Impressionist landscapes and genre subjects. He spent the summer of 1885 in Broadway, a small village in Worcestershire, where he painted "Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose" (Tate Gallery, London), a depiction of two small girls in a flower garden. When debuted at the Royal Academy in May of 1887, the pa...
