page_965 < previous page page_965 next page > Page 965 Salon accepted The Oyster Gatherers of Cancale; in 1879, his portrait of Carolus-Duran received honorable mention. Other critically acclaimed works included El Jaleo and The Daughters of Edward D. Boit. In these years he also sought to establish his reputation in America by sending pictures to the New York exhibitions of the Society of American Artists, a group of younger, Paris-trained painters then challenging the older American academicians. Portrait commissions began to come his way, but dropped off with the scandal of his 1884 Salon entry, Madame X (Madame Pierre Gautreau). This portrait of an American society beauty married to a successful French banker attracted criticism because of what seemed to be the subject's eccentric exhibitionism. Sargent retreated to England where portrait commissions still awaited him. Patrons and friends, including the expatriate American novelist Henry James, urged him to stay, and the following year he established permanent residence in London. A highly complimentary article by James in 1887 for Harper's New Monthly Magazine boosted Sargent's reputation just as he arrived in America for exhibitions of his work in Boston and New York. During his next trip to America (18891890), portrait commissions almost over-whelmed him, but he also agreed to paint murals for the new Boston Public Library. Over the next three decades Sargent spent much time in Boston while he finished this commission as well as murals for Harvard University and the Museum of Fine Arts. On both sides of the Atlantic the celebrated Sargent was sought after to paint portraits of American businessmen and financiers, English manufacturers and their wives, fashionable Edwardian aristocrats, and the English gentry. The international art community admired his style of seemingly effortless, bravura brushwork and dashing likenesses. But he tired of portrait requests and increasingly turned his attention to painting his sisters Emily Sargent and Violet Ormond and Violet's family, and, more and more, holiday subjects in watercolor and oil. History will remember Sargent as a portraitist in the grand tradition of Van Dyck, Reynolds, and Gainsborough. He captured the poise and authority of the prominent and influential in an era when the British Empire reached its zenith and America had arrived as a dominant international power. Patricia Hills, John Singer Sargent (1986); Stanley Olson, John Singer Sargent: His Portrait (1986). PATRICIA HILLS See also Painting and Sculpture. Scalawags During the period of Congressional Reconstruction after the Civil War (18671876), southern white Republicans were called "scalawags" by their political opponents. The scalawags were considered traitors by many white southerners for supporting the party that had led the fight against the Confederacy and had now placed the defeated South under military rule. The fact that the majority of southern Republicans were former slaves and free blacks and that others in the party were newcomers from the North (whom the southern conservatives called "carpetbaggers") made the scalawags' behavior seem even more disloyal. For many years, historians accepted the conservatives' view that most scalawags were corrupt opportunists, the dregs of southern society. More recent analysis, however, has shown that they represented a much broader variety of backgrounds and motivations. Some undoubtedly were careerists; some were up-country yeoman farmers who had contested the domination of the planter aristocracy for decades; others were planters themselves, often former Whigs who had opposed secession but fought for the South once war was declared. And though many scalawag officials were guilty of corruption, their political practices do not appear to have differed significantly from those of their opponents or of their contemporaries in other sections of the country. With many former Confederates disfranchised and with freedmen hesitant at first to assert political leadership, the scalawags took the lead initially in establishing and administering the Republican state governments. Factionalism  < previous page page_965 next page >

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