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SARGENT, JOHN SINGER. (1856-1925). American portrait artist. APCS. (“John S. Sargent”). 1/3p. Postcard. , March 14, 1918. A picture postcard reproduction of his painting Mater Dolorosa, or the Madonna of the Sorrows, printed in 1916 by the Boston Public Library Employee Benefit Association. Inscribed and signed vertically in the margins to the left and right of the image to William Reihman Weber, “in appreciation of a beautiful sonnet.” After an itinerant upbringing by expatriate Americans in Europe, Sargent received formal training at the École des Beaux-Arts and immediately earned recognition at the Paris Salon in 1877. Influenced by Spanish artist Diego Velazquez, Sargent established himself as the leading portrait painter of the day, working variously in Paris, London, New York, and Boston, where he painted the likenesses of Boston arts patron Isabella Stewart Gardner, actress Ellen Terry in her role as Lady Macbeth, author Robert Louis Stevenson, Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and financier John D. Rockefeller. In Boston, he also painted murals the Museum of Fine Arts, Harvard’s Widener Library, and, most notably, at the Boston Public Library. The latter was the largest of his mural projects, which he worked on for three decades, leaving it uncompleted at the time of his death. The Triumph of Religion traces the history of religion across cultures and includes the 1916 depiction of Madonna of Sorrows, reproduced on our postcard. In fine condition.