John Singer Sargent
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"John Singer Sargent" was an American artist, considered the "leading portrait painter of his generation" for his evocations of Edwardian era luxury. During his career, he created roughly 900 oil paintings and more than 2,000 watercolors, as well as countless sketches and charcoal drawings. His oeuvre documents worldwide travel, from Venice to the Tyrol, Corfu, the Middle East, Montana, Maine, and Florida.

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To work is to pray.

I have now got a bombproof shelter [the Continent] into which I retire when I sniff the coming portrait or its trajectory.

I hate to paint portraits! I hope never to paint another portrait in my life. Portraiture may be all right for a man in his youth, but after forty I believe that manual dexterity deserts one, and, besides, the color-sense is less acute. Youth can better stand the exactions of a personal kind that are inseparable from portraiture. I have had enough of it.

Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.

I don't dig beneath the surface for things that don't appear before my own eyes.

Mine is the horny hand of toil.

A portrait is a painting with something wrong with the mouth.

I do not judge, I only chronicle.

Color is an inborn gift, but appreciation of value is merely training of the eye, which everyone ought to be able to acquire.