John Singer Sargent was the most sought-after portrait painter of the Gilded Age, yet he grew up without a permanent home, was educated in the museums of Europe rather than a classroom, and risked everything on a portrait no one commissioned. This episode traces his nomadic childhood, his training in Paris under Carolus-Duran's improvisational alla prima method, and the 1884 Paris Salon disaster of Madame X, where a single fallen shoulder strap on Virginie Gautreau's black gown destroyed his French career and sent him to London.

From there we look at how Sargent rebuilt himself into a dictatorial master of society portraiture, working without assistants, mixing his own pigments, and rearranging his clients' furniture and wardrobes, while privately producing watercolors and male nudes he never showed. We discuss his years using Thomas McKell ...