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 Daughters of Edward Darley Boit | Paul Helleu Sketching with his wife | Portrait of William Merritt Chase | Countess of Rocksavage | Ragazzo nudo sulla spiaggia |
Related Artists:
TASSEL, Jean
French Baroque Era Painter, ca.1608-1667 Son of Richard Tassel, with whose works his own were for a long time confused. He trained with his father and by 1634 was recorded in Rome, where he came into contact with his fellow Frenchmen Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin and Sebastien Bourdon. Like the last he was influenced by the Bamboccianti, and he painted a number of low-life genre scenes at this period; these include Singers in a Tavern (Kassel, Schloss Wilhelmshehe) and Travellers Attacked (Warsaw, N. Mus.). He had returned to Langres by 1647, the date of his marriage, and continued to paint genre pictures after this, such as The Sawyers (Strasbourg, Mus. B.-A.) and The Marauders (Langres, Mus. St Didier). Other influences from Rome include Caravaggio, strong in a picture such as the Fortune-teller (sold Paris, Drouot, 1 April 1987, ) but far less apparent in the Presentation of the Infant Jesus (Dijon, Mus. B.-A.) and Tobias and the Angel (Dijon, Mus. B.-A.). However, the most lasting influence was that of the Romano-Bolognese school, seen in later pictures such as the Annunciation
Jean-Jacques Bachelier
(1724 - 1806) was a French painter and director of the porcelain factory at Sevres. Admitted to the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1752, he founded an art school using his own means in Paris in 1765 for the artisans in the historic college d'Autun (rue de l'ecole de medecine), which survived until the 19th century. For a list of works see: Jean-Jacques Bachelier (French edition), including Roman Charity (1765).
william henry hunt,o.w.s
1790-1864 was an English watercolour painter. He was born near Long Acre, London, and was apprenticed in about 1805 to John Varley, the landscape-painter, with whom he remained five or six years. He exhibited three oil pictures at the Royal Academy in 1807. He became connected with the Society of Painters in Water Colours at its beginning, and was elected an associate in 1824 and a full member in 1827. Until the year of his death, he was one of the most prolific contributors to the Society's exhibitions. Many years of Hunt's uneventful but industrious life were spent at Hastings. He died of apoplexy. Hunt was one of the creators of the English school of water-color painting. His subjects, especially those of his later life, are extremely simple; but, by the delicacy, humor and fine power of their treatment, they rank second to works of the highest art only. Considered technically, his works exhibit all the resources of the water-color painter's craft, from the purest transparent tinting to the boldest use of gouache, rough paper and scraping for texture. His sense of color is perhaps as true as that of any English artist. He was, says John Ruskin, all in all, the finest ever painter of still life. Several characteristic examples of Hunt's work, as the "Boy and Goat," "Brown Study and Plums," "Primroses and Birds' Nests" are in the Victoria and Albert Museum.