John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) was born in Florence on 12 January 1856 to American parents who had left the United States and lived the rest of their lives as expatriates. He studied at the Accademia in Florence, and in 1874 entered the Paris atelier of the portraitist Carolus-Duran, who sent his pupils to Velázquez and Frans Hals and taught them to paint directly on the canvas. Sargent exhibited at the Salon from 1877.
His career in Paris collapsed in 1884, when his portrait of Virginie Gautreau, shown as Madame X, scandalised the Salon with its provocative pose and neckline. At the urging of his friend Henry James he settled in London in 1886. There, at Broadway in the Cotswolds, he painted Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose, a garden twilight with two girls lighting paper lanterns. By the end of the century he was the most sought-after portrait painter of his generation, and he became a full Royal Academician in 1897.
Sargent grew tired of commissions and spent his summers painting for himself: Alpine peaks, Venetian canals and sunlit watercolours made on his travels. In 1919 he painted Gassed, a vast picture of soldiers blinded by gas on the Western Front, now in the Imperial War Museum. He died in London in April 1925.