John Singer Sargent earned for himself fame and fortune as a painter of realistic portraits of society ladies adorned in fashionable and elaborate dress and carefully posed so that the viewer of the painting knew that they were posed. After that period, which covered about the last two decades of the Nineteenth Century, and after which time Sargent was known as a painter of the previous generation, he tried to reinvent his style, however much, when he went back to doing an occasional portrait, he returned to his original realistic style. The new style was to be a take on Impressionism, and it did not catch on, however much he worked at it. Now, there are other great painters who are able to develop alternative styles that are impressive, Picasso and Matisse among them, Picasso, in fact, inventing a new style every decade of his career, but that was not to be for Sargent, and so his efforts in that direction draw attention to how difficult it is to think up a new way of seeing especially after having so thoroughly mastered a previous one.