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 :. | THe Oyster Gatherers of Cancale | Mrs. Henry Phipps and Her Grandson Winston | Portrait of Miss Eden | Gebrt Hanes (mk18) | Portrait of Two Children |
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BOCCACCINO, Camillo
Italian painter, Cremonese school (b. 1504/5, Cremona, d. 1546, Cremona) Camillo Boccaccino (c. 1504 - 1546) was an Italian painter of the Renaissance period, active mainly in Cremona and regions of Lombardy. He was the son and pupil of the painter Boccaccio Boccaccino. He was known to Gian Paolo Lomazzo and Giorgio Vasari. He painted the four evangelists (1537) in the niches of the cupola of San Sigismondo at Cremona.
CAVALLINO, Bernardo
Italian Baroque Era Painter, ca.1616-1656 Italian painter and draughtsman. He was the most individual and most poetic painter active in Naples during the first half of the 17th century. He painted mainly small cabinet pictures, on canvas or on copper, for dealers and for highly cultivated private patrons; he had few public commissions and apparently never painted any large-scale decorations for private or ecclesiastical patrons. His subject-matter is largely derived from the Old and New Testaments, the Apocrypha, Tasso and from Roman history and mythology. Documentary evidence for his life and work is almost non-existent, and he remains enigmatic and elusive as a historical figure. Yet as a painter he is strikingly distinctive, uniting a refinement and virtuosity of brushwork with an intensely naturalistic observation of surfaces, and complex and dramatic compositions with an extraordinary brilliance of palette. Only eight pictures are signed, initialled or inscribed with Cavallino's name. No works are documented and only five may be tentatively identified with pictures in mid-18th-century Neapolitan collections described by Bernardo de Dominici.
Frederick james shields
1833-1911