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 :. | Spanish Dancer by John Singer Sargent | Aranjuez | Theodore Roosevelt (mk18) | Portrait of Benjamin Kissam | Orestes Pursued by the Furies |
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MANTEGNA, Andrea
Italian Early Renaissance Painter, ca.1431-1506 Italian painter and printmaker. He occupies a pre-eminent position among Italian artists of the 15th century. The profound enthusiasm for the civilization of ancient Rome that infuses his entire oeuvre was unprecedented in a painter. In addition to its antiquarian content, his art is characterized by brilliant compositional solutions, the bold and innovative use of perspective and foreshortening and a precise and deliberate manner of execution, an aspect that was commented upon during his lifetime. He was held in great esteem by his contemporaries for his learning and skill and, significantly, he is the only artist of the period to have left a small corpus of self-portraits: two in the Ovetari Chapel; his presumed self-portrait in the Presentation in the Temple (Berlin, Gemeldegal.); one in the Camera Picta (Mantua, Pal. Ducale) and the funerary bust in his burial chapel in S Andrea, Mantua, designed and probably executed by himself. His printmaking activity is technically advanced and of great importance, although certain aspects of the execution remain to be clarified.
Giuseppe de nittis
Italian, 1846-1884 Italian painter, pastellist and printmaker. Throughout his career he was committed to a plein-air aesthetic and was particularly interested in rendering varying light effects, a concern that brought him into contact with the Impressionists. He was also acquainted with the members of the Macchiaioli, for whom his work was influential. In addition to oils, he experimented with printmaking and made innovative use of pastels. Practising a restrained, and therefore 'acceptable', form of Impressionism,
thomas malton
Thomas Malton (1748 - 7 March 1804), the younger, was an English painter of topographical and architectural views, and an engraver. J M W Turner and Thomas Girtin were amongst his pupils. He is designated the younger to differentiate him from his father Thomas Malton the elder. Malton was born in London, the son of Thomas Malton the elder, a notable architectural draughtsman and writer on geometry. He was with his father during the latter's residence in Dublin, Ireland, and then passed three years in the office of James Gandon the architect, in London. In 1774 Malton received a premium from the Society of Arts. He entered the Royal Academy and in 1782 gained a gold medal for his design for a theatre. In 1773 he sent the Academy a view of Covent Garden, and was afterwards a constant exhibitor, chiefly of views of London streets and buildings, drawn in Indian ink and tinted. In these there is little attempt at pictorial effect, but their extreme accuracy in the architectural details renders them of great interest and value as topographical records. They are enlivened with groups of figures, in which Malton is said to have been assisted by Francis Wheatley. After leaving Ireland, Malton appears to have always lived in London - with the exception of a brief stay at Bath in 1780. From 1783 to 1789 he resided in Conduit Street (London), and at an evening drawing class which he held there, received as pupils Thomas Girtin and young J M W Turner, whose father brought him to be taught perspective. Turner paid tribute to him in later life by saying My real master was Tom Malton. In 1791 Malton removed to Great Titchfield Street, and finally, in 1796, to Long Acre. He made a few of the drawings for Watts's Seats of the Nobility and Gentry published in 1779, and executed some large aquatints of buildings in both London and Bath, being one of the first to avail himself of the newly introduced art of aquatinta for the purpose of multiplying copies of his views. He also painted some scenes for Covent Garden Theatre. In 1792 Malton published the work by which he is now best known, A Picturesque Tour through the Cities of London and Westminster, illustrated with a hundred aquatint plates. Between 1798 -1800 he produced Views from Cambridge, and at the time of his death was engaged upon a similar series of views of Oxford, some of which appeared in parts in 1802, and were reissued with others in 1810. Malton died in Long Acre, London on 7 March 1804, leaving a widow and six children. His portrait, painted by Gilbert Stuart, was engraved by William Barney in 1806. A portrait of his son Charles, when a child, drawn by Sir Thomas Lawrence, was engraved by F C Lewis. Malton's brother James Malton was also a notable artist, draughtsman and engraver.