For a number of years he commuted between New York and Europe. In 1892, after the great success of his portraits of Senator Chauncey Depew in 1890 (Yale Club of New York City) and Mrs Theodore Havemeyer in 1891 (now the property of the Preservation Society of Newport County, Rhode Island), he applied for United States citizenship. It was apparently at this date that he met the young art dealer Joseph Duveen, who was to become a close friend, and after 1891 that he began to be dubbed 'Painter to the Four Hundred', referring the élite of New York society in whose circles he socialized. He was much aided by the Havemeyers, and also by Louis Benziger (1840–1896), a Roman Catholic publisher (Benziger Brothers), who persuaded many New Yorkers to sit to him; he remained friendly with his son Bruno Benziger until his death, and indeed Bruno Benziger organized the artist's burial.