Portrait of Léon Delafosse

Sargent usually painted the rich because they paid him well. This one he did for free. Leon Delafosse was a young French pianist, barely into his twenties in the mid-1890s, handsome and gifted and hungry to rise. Sargent liked him, painted him standing slim and elegant, and simply gave him the finished portrait as a gift. Delafosse had powerful patrons for a while, chiefly the dandy-poet Robert de Montesquiou, and he moved through the same Paris salons as the young Marcel Proust, who is thought to have folded him into his novel as the ambitious musician Charles Morel. Both men eventually dropped him, and the salon doors closed. Sargent's picture catches him at the hopeful end of that story, poised, and looking every bit the coming man.