1856-1925 John Singer Sargent Locations John Singer Sargent (January 12, 1856 ?C April 14, 1925) was the most successful portrait painter of his era. During his career, he created roughly 900 oil paintings and more than 2,000 watercolors, as well as countless sketches and charcoal drawings. His oeuvre documents worldwide travel, from Venice to the Tyrol, Corfu, the Middle East, Montana, Maine, and Florida. Before Sargent??s birth, his father FitzWilliam was an eye surgeon at the Wills Hospital in Philadelphia. After his older sister died at the age of two, his mother Mary (n??e Singer) suffered a mental collapse and the couple decided to go abroad to recover. They remained nomadic ex-patriates for the rest of their lives. Though based in Paris, Sargent??s parents moved regularly with the seasons to the sea and the mountain resorts in France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland. While she was pregnant, they stopped in Florence, Italy because of a cholera epidemic, and there Sargent was born in 1856. A year later, his sister Mary was born. After her birth FitzWilliam reluctantly resigned his post in Philadelphia and accepted his wife??s entreaties to remain abroad. They lived modestly on a small inheritance and savings, living an isolated life with their children and generally avoiding society and other Americans except for friends in the art world. Four more children were born abroad of whom two lived past childhood. Though his father was a patient teacher of basic subjects, young Sargent was a rambunctious child, more interested in outdoor activities than his studies. As his father wrote home, ??He is quite a close observer of animated nature.?? Contrary to his father, his mother was quite convinced that traveling around Europe, visiting museums and churches, would give young Sargent a satisfactory education. Several attempts to give him formal schooling failed, owning mostly to their itinerant life. She was a fine amateur artist and his father was a skilled medical illustrator. Early on, she gave him sketchbooks and encouraged drawing excursions. Young Sargent worked with care on his drawings, and he enthusiastically copied images from the Illustrated London News of ships and made detailed sketches of landscapes. FitzWilliam had hoped that his son??s interest in ships and the sea might lead him toward a naval career. At thirteen, his mother reported that John ??sketches quite nicely, & has a remarkably quick and correct eye. If we could afford to give him really good lessons, he would soon be quite a little artist.?? At age thirteen, he received some watercolor lessons from Carl Welsch, a German landscape painter. Though his education was far from complete, Sargent grew up to be a highly literate and cosmopolitan young man, accomplished in art, music, and literature. He was fluent in French, Italian, and German. At seventeen, Sargent was described as ??willful, curious, determined and strong?? (after his mother) yet shy, generous, and modest (after his father). He was well-acquainted with many of the great masters from first hand observation, as he wrote in 1874, ??I have learned in Venice to admire Tintoretto immensely and to consider him perhaps second only to Michael Angelo and Titian.??  Related Paintings of John Singer Sargent :. | La Riva | Garden Study of the Vickers Children | Padre Sebastiano (mk18) | Lady Eden | Charles Martin Loeffler |
Related Artists:
Hans Multscher
German Northern Renaissance Sculptor, ca.1400-1467 German sculptor. Multscher mentions his birthplace on the inscribed band, originally a predella, of the Karg altarpiece in Ulm Cathedral (1433) and on two wings of the so-called 'Wurzach Altar' (1437) at Reichenhofen in the Allgeu. The town archives of Leutkirch, written between 1405 and 1437, record that Multscher belonged to the 'Freien Leute auf Leutkircher Heide', a commune of free peasants who had been able to preserve their independence because they were the direct descendants of Kenigsfreie, who had always been free. Under a charter of Emperor Ludwig in 1337
thomas creswick
Thomas Creswick (5 February 1811 - 28 December 1869) was an English landscape painter and illustrator, born in Sheffield, son of Thomas Creswick and Mary Epworth and educated at Hazelwood, near Birmingham. At Birmingham he first began to paint. His earliest appearance as an exhibitor was in 1827, at the Society of British Artists in London; in the ensuing year he sent to the Royal Academy the two pictures named Llyn Gwynant, Morning, and Carnarvon Castle. About the same time he settled in London; and in 1836 he took a house in Bayswater. He soon attracted some attention as a landscape painter, and had a career of uniform and encouraging, though not signal success. In 1842 he was elected an associate, and in 1850 a full member of the Royal Academy, which, for several years before his death, numbered hardly any other full members representing this branch of art. In his early practice he set an example, then too much needed, of diligent study of nature out of doors, painting on the spot all the substantial part of several of his pictures. English and Welsh streams may be said to have formed his favourite subjects, and generally British rural scenery, mostly under its cheerful, calm and pleasurable aspects, in open daylight. This he rendered with elegant and equable skill, color rather grey in tint, especially in his later years, and more than average technical accomplishment; his works have little to excite, but would, in most conditions of public taste, retain their power to attract. Creswick was industrious and extremely prolific; he produced, besides a steady outpouring of paintings, numerous illustrations for books. He was personally genial, a dark, bulky man, somewhat heavy and graceless in aspect in his later years. He died at his house in Bayswater, Linden Grove, after a few years of declining health. Among his principal works may be named England (1847); Home by the Sands, and a Squally Day (1848); Passing Showers (1849); The Wind on Shore, a First Glimpse of the Sea, and Old Trees (1850); A Mountain Lake, Moonrise (1852); Changeable Weather (1865); also the London Road, a Hundred Years ago; The Weald of Kent; the Valley Mill (a Cornish subject); a Shady Glen; the Windings of a River; the Shade of the Beech Trees; the Course of the Greta; the Wharfe; Glendalough, and other Irish subjects, 1836 to 1840; the Forest Farm Frith for figures, and Ansdell for animals, occasionally worked in collaboration with Creswick.
Theodore Butler
1861-1936