This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Topic Collections  • Humanities  • Humanities, Other  • Alert me on articles by topic

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) Mountain Fire c 1903-1908, American. Watercolor. 35.5 x 50.8 cm. Courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY (http://www.brooklynmuseum.org); purchased by special subscription.

He was Europe's and America's society painter, a peripatetic portrait painter who moved between business, social, and intellectual circles in London, Paris, Boston, and New York as easily as though he owned the master key. Wherever he was, he painted that city's rich and famous, sometimes their scandalous as well. Then, in 1908, with some 400 portraits behind him, and still in his early 50s, he shocked international society by announcing that he would no longer accept portrait commissions. "No more portraits," he is reported as saying, ". . . I abhor and abjure them and hope never to do another, especially of the Upper Classes." He would concentrate instead on "real painting": mural decorations for the Boston Public Library . . . [Full Text of this Article]