Édouard Pailleron

When Sargent painted this in 1879 he was 23, an American still finishing his training in Paris, and this was the first portrait anyone paid him to make. The sitter, Edouard Pailleron, was a fashionable French playwright whose comedies filled Paris theatres, exactly the sort of well-placed client a young artist needed. Sargent painted him outdoors at the family's country house over the summer, standing three-quarter length with a book in one hand and a slightly careless, worldly air. He would go on to become the most sought-after portraitist of his generation on both sides of the Atlantic, and the confidence is already here in this first commission. The picture was shown at the Paris Salon the next year. The playwright's widow later gave it to the French state, and it now hangs in the Musee d'Orsay.