Editing John Singer Sargent (section)

====Twentieth-century portraits====

By 1900, Sargent was at the height of his fame. Cartoonist [[Max Beerbohm]] completed one of his seventeen caricatures of Sargent, making well known to the public the artist's paunchy physique.<ref>Fairbrother (1994), p. 97.</ref><ref>Little (1998), p. 12.</ref> Although only in his forties, Sargent began to travel more and to devote relatively less time to portrait painting. His ''An Interior in Venice'' (1900), a portrait of four members of the Curtis family in their elegant palatial home, ''[[Palazzo Barbaro]]'', was a resounding success. But, [[James Abbott McNeill Whistler|Whistler]] did not approve of the looseness of Sargent's brushwork, which he summed up as "smudge everywhere".<ref>Fairbrother (1994), p. 101.</ref> One of Sargent's last major portraits in his bravura style was that of [[Lord Ribblesdale (Sargent)|Lord Ribblesdale]], in 1902, finely attired in an elegant hunting uniform. Between 1900 and 1907, Sargent continued his high productivity, which included, in addition to dozens of oil portraits, hundreds of portrait drawings at about $400 each.<ref>Fairbrother (1994), p. 118.</ref> In 1901, he purchased the next door property to his home in [[Tite Street]], to create a larger studio.<ref name="vch" />

In 1907, at the age of fifty-one, Sargent officially closed his studio. Relieved, he stated: "Painting a portrait would be quite amusing if one were not forced to talk while working.... What a nuisance having to entertain the sitter and to look happy when one feels wretched."<ref>Olson (1986), p. 227.</ref> In that same year, Sargent painted his modest and serious self-portrait, his last, for the celebrated self-portrait collection of the [[Uffizi Gallery]] in Florence, Italy.<ref>Fairbrother (1994), p. 124.</ref>

Sargent made several summer visits to the Swiss Alps with his sisters [[Emily Sargent]], an accomplished painter in her own right, and Violet Sargent (Mrs Ormond) and also Violet's daughters Rose-Marie and Reine, who were the subject of a number of paintings between 1906 and 1913 like ''The Black Brook'' (1908) or ''Nonchaloir (Repose)'' (1911).<ref name="McCouat">{{cite web |last=McCouat |first=Philip |title=Rose-Marie Ormond Sargent's Muse and 'the Most Charming Girl That Ever Lived' |url= http://www.artinsociety.com/rose-marie-ormond-sargentrsquos-muse-and-ldquothe-most-charming-girl-that-ever-livedrdquo.html# |website=Journal of Art in Society |access-date=July 8, 2020}}</ref>

[[File:John Singer Sargent - Repose.jpg|thumb|left| ''Nonchaloir (Repose)'', 1911. The model is Rose-Marie Ormond Michel, Sargent's  niece.]]
By the time Sargent finished his portrait of [[John D. Rockefeller]] in 1917, most critics began to consign him to the masters of the past, "a brilliant ambassador between his patrons and posterity". Modernists treated him more harshly, considering him completely out of touch with the reality of American life and with emerging artistic trends including [[Cubism]] and [[Futurism]].<ref>Fairbrother (1994), p. 131.</ref> Sargent quietly accepted the criticism, but refused to alter his negative opinions of modern art. He retorted: "[[Ingres]], [[Raphael]] and [[El Greco]], these are now my admirations, these are what I like."<ref>Fairbrother (1994), p. 133.</ref>

Sometime between 1917 and 1920, Sargent painted the portrait of [[Thomas McKeller]], a young African-American elevator operator and WWI veteran. The canvas was kept in the painter's studio until his death and only began to be displayed permanently to the public in 1986 when it was acquired by the [[Museum of Fine Arts in Boston]]. McKeller also posed as a model for the mythological murals that Sargent painted at the stairway and the rotunda of the MFA Boston and for the World War I memorial murals at Harvard's [[Widener Library]].<ref>{{cite web |url= https://www.incollect.com/articles/boston-s-apollo-thomas-mckeller-and-john-singer-sargent |title=Boston's Apollo: Thomas McKellery and John Singer Sargent by Nathaniel Silver}}</ref>

In 1925, shortly before he died, Sargent painted his last oil portrait, a canvas of aristocrat [[Grace Curzon, Marchioness Curzon of Kedleston]]. The painting was purchased in 1936 by the [[Currier Museum of Art]], in Manchester, New Hampshire, where it has been on display since then.<ref>{{cite web |url= http://collections.currier.org/Obj13$170 |title=EmbARK Web Kiosk |archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20070928091652/http://collections.currier.org/Obj13%24170 |archive-date=September 28, 2007}}</ref>