One summer’s day towards the end of the 1880s, Claude Monet sat painting at the edge of a wood near his home in Giverny. Although he was already being besieged by eager American students, Monet was apparently oblivious to the fact that, on this occasion, his activities were being observed. As he quietly painted, John Singer Sargent made the impressionist painter the subject of his own, quick, sketch. Obviously Sargent was no simple student, as Kenneth McConkey makes clear in our book British Impressionism. the American painter was already the most important portraitist of his generation, one whose era-defining paintings captured the heiresses, statesmen and industrialists of the Gilded Age. Yet the artist – who is sometimes regarded as a traditionalist – recognized in Impressionism an element that was absent his own art. Sargent first met Monet in 1876 and, during the 1880s... (http://de.phaidon.com/agenda/art/articles/2015/february/12/what-happened-the-day-sargent-painted-monet/)