Hombre con laureles

Sargent was barely into his twenties when he made this, still a student in the Paris studio of the fashionable portraitist Carolus-Duran. Despite the laurel wreath, the man is neither a hero nor a saint. He was a professional artist's model, and the same face turns up in another Sargent canvas of these years, standing before a studio stove. What the young painter was practising is the thing his teacher drummed into him: build a head straight from patches of light and shadow, with no fussy drawing underneath. The brightest, thickest touches of paint are saved for the nose and chin, where the studio light would have caught the face first.