Free Strapless by Deborah Davis Page B

and since Carolus-Duran was friendly with Monet, it is no wonder that some of his experiments show elements of Impressionism.
    At the same time that Sargent was absorbing new ideas about color and movement, he was learning that art was big business. Talent alone rarely catapulted a living artist to success. A working artist in Third Republic Paris required keen commercial instincts and a sound business plan. Carolus-Duran set an excellent example for his protégé, who knew that his teacher’s career had advanced in no small part because of his ability to maneuver through society as a well-paid portraitist.
    Sargent needed to make money. His family depended more and more on him financially. His mother and father were getting older. Emily, his childhood playmate and companion, would never leave home; her ill health had turned her into a spinster. Violet was still a child. As the only son and the only healthy and productive member of the family, Sargent understood that it would be his responsibility to support all of them, emotionally as well as economically. He would have to command sizable fees. He decided on a career painting portraits.
    Portraiture, an established genre for hundreds of years, evolved to fulfill a basic human need, providing people with likenesses of their loved ones. This was especially important after a death, when mourners wanted a way to remember the deceased. A generalized depiction of a face—a vague rendering of features and coloring—would never do. Even early portraits, however primitively rendered, had to emphasize a subject’s individuality. The Grove Dictionary of Art defines a portrait as an image in which “the artist is engaged with the personality of his sitter and is preoccupied with his or her characterization as an individual.” The challenge for portraitists has always been to find their own way of conveying that individuality.
    In the eighteenth century, artists elevated portraiture by making it grand and heroic. Commissioned by the royal or the very rich to create artistic testimonials to power, wealth, beauty, and status, painters made their subjects took larger than life. But patrons discovered that a portrait did not have to be physically big to be effective. Miniature portraits, called limnings or “paintings in little,” also became popular. The word miniature, in this case, had nothing to do with the diminutive size of the portrait. In the past, illuminated manuscripts with their small illustrations—often a depiction of the patron who had commissioned the work—were created with a red lead pigment called minium. When these illustrations evolved into freestanding portraits, the term minium turned into “miniature.”
    Executed with fine brushes in watercolor on vellum, or in oil on enamel and ivory, miniatures were practical forms of portraiture because, mere inches long, encased in delicate frames, they could be held in the palm or worn as jewelry. They were also easy to transport, and proved especially useful in negotiating marriages: they could be sent to prospective brides and bridegrooms, and their parents, to show what the betrothed might look like.
    The silhouette, a profile traced onto and cut from black paper, was a simple alternative for people who could not afford other forms of portraiture, which, in the eighteenth century, was still an expensive proposition. They were named after Étienne de Silhouette, a French government official who in 1759 imposed such harsh economic demands that his name became synonymous with anything done very cheaply. The quick outlines, created at virtually no cost, came to be known as portraits à la Silhouette. A clever artist could create likeness even with such rudimentary tools as paper and scissors. Parts of these silhouettes, for instance the lips, were sometimes colored to add life to the image.
    A more technologically advanced method of obtaining an image of a loved one was announced in France in 1839 by Louis Daguerre.