His paintings are among the most treasured at American museums: from The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882) at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston – a fascinating composition of four young sisters influenced by Las Meninas (1656) by Diego Velázquez – to Portrait of Madame X (1884) − which caused a scandal at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. From Dr. Pozzi at Home (1881), a flamboyant portrait of a Parisian surgeon and gynecologist (and renowned seducer and art lover) depicted standing in a long crimson dressing gown at the Hammer Museum (University of California, Los Angeles), to El Jaleo (1882), a spectacular nighttime scene of a Romani dance, at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. These four masterpieces share a common thread: All are early works by John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) and were painted in Paris.

In France, however, the American painter is almost unknown. In fact, the current exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay is the first ever dedicated to him in the country – and, internationally, the first to focus on his Parisian years, offering a pivotal addition to research on the artist. And yet, Sargent was not always a stranger in Paris.

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