Carolus-Duran

This is the man who taught Sargent to paint, Carolus-Duran, one of the most fashionable portraitists in Paris in the 1870s. In his studio there was no slow careful drawing first. You loaded the brush and worked straight onto the canvas, wet into wet, the way he had learned from studying Velázquez in Madrid. Sargent, still in his early twenties, painted his teacher in exactly that manner and sent it to the Salon of 1879. It was the hit of the show, and portrait commissions started coming in. Look for the dedication he worked into the canvas, to his dear master, signed by an affectionate pupil, a student announcing himself by how well he could paint the person who had trained him.