Auguste Rodin

Sargent painted this portrait of the sculptor Auguste Rodin in 1884, the same year his scandalous Madame X was jeered at the Paris Salon and pushed him toward London. The two men had met in Paris a few years earlier and stayed friends for decades. Sargent inscribed the canvas 'to my friend Rodin,' and Rodin, impressed, took to calling him the Van Dyck of their time, after the great portraitist of two centuries before. It is a quick, dark, informal thing beside Sargent's grand society commissions, closer to a gift between colleagues than a job of work. Rodin kept it, and in 1916, near the end of his life, he handed it to the museum the French state was setting up in his own name.