In 1879, the twenty-three-year-old John Singer Sargent, having recently completed his studies at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, made his first trip to Spain as an adult; he had last been there when he was twelve, on a family trip. (Born in Florence in 1856 to expatriate American parents, he died in London in 1925). Sargent returned to Spain six more times before 1912, crossing the country from the Pyrenees to Gibraltar, from Santiago de Compostela to Majorca, and spending extended time in Madrid, Barcelona, and Granada. He studied the work of Diego Velázquez, Francisco Goya, and El Greco and paid close attention, as well, to Moorish architecture, Flamenco dancers, ruined mansions, monuments, gardens, the landscape, and the occasional pig herder, reveling in all things Iberian. He recorded his responses with pencil sketches, fluid watercolors, and oils, done on the spot, exploiting his virtuosity to make works at once apparently casual and faultlessly evocative of both his chosen subjects and the play of intense light. Like any tourist in the era before cellphones, he acquired postcard images and photographs of places and works of art that he found particularly compelling, taking some photos himself and eventually amassing an archive of about six hundred pictures.
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