An accomplished musician himself, Sargent was known for talking constantly while he painted, and would walk around the room (he once estimated that he walked four miles every day going back and forth around his model and the easel) and interrupt his work to play the piano.... Although Sargent’s subjects were often posed, his oeuvre suggests the painter as flaneur, strolling through metropolitan cities and capturing the personalities he encountered, the scenes he saw. His own coterie was stylish, knowing, chic: he portrayed other painters, sculptors, musicians, actors, dancers, including WB Yeats, Eleonora Duse, Edwin Booth, Edmund Gosse, George Meredith, Antonio Mancini (whom Sargent once described as “the best living painter”), the collector and hostess Isabella Stewart Gardner. There is the famous portrait of Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth, raising the crown on to her head, and the 1885... (https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/jan/30/how-john-singer-sargent-made-a-scene)