Mrs. Asher Wertheimer

1890s

Fourteen portrait commissions a year

In the 1890s Sargent averages fourteen portrait commissions per year, among them the genteel “Lady Agnew of Lochnaw” (1892) and the equally well received “Mrs. Hugh Hammersley” (1892); as a portrait painter in the grand manner he is referred to as “the Van Dyck of our times”.

1895–1919

The “Triumph of Religion” murals for the Boston Public Library

From 1895 through 1919, for almost thirty years, Sargent works on his largest-scale work, the mural decorations “Triumph of Religion” for the Boston Public Library, showing religion's progress from pagan superstition to the ascension of Christianity; he never completes the final mural of the cycle.

1898

Asher Wertheimer commissions a dozen family portraits

In 1898 Asher Wertheimer, a wealthy Jewish art dealer living in London, commissions from Sargent a series of a dozen portraits of his family, the artist's largest commission from a single patron; most of them, bequeathed to the National Gallery, are now on display at Tate Britain.

1900

At the height of his fame: “An Interior in Venice”

By 1900 Sargent is at the height of his fame; although only in his forties, he begins to travel more and devote relatively less time to portrait painting. His “An Interior in Venice” (1900), a portrait of four members of the Curtis family in their palatial home, Palazzo Barbaro, is a resounding success, although Whistler disapproves of the looseness of his brushwork, summing it up as “smudge everywhere”.