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 :. | William Merritt Chase (mk18) | Portrait of Rosina | Woman with Collie (mk18) | View of Capri | Boboli |
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Jakob Smits
Jakob Smits or Jacob Smits (Rotterdam, 9 July 1855 - Achterbos (Mol), 15 February 1928) was a Dutch-Flemish painter. He was born as son of a decorator. Jakob studied in Rotterdam at the academy and helped its father in the decoration business. From 1873 up to 1876 het studied at the Academy in Brussels, and afterwards also in Munich (1878-1880), Vienna (1880) and Rome (1880). In 1882, Jakob married his cousin Antje Doetje Kramer. They settled in Amsterdam, where Smits worked as a painter. He carried out, among other things, tasks for the museum Boijmans-Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. Out of the marriage of Jakob and Antje two children, Theodora and Annie, were born. In 1884, the couple divorced. Jakob Smits moved to Blaricum and in Haarlem becomes director of the Nijverheids- en Decoratieschool (E: Industry and Decoration school). He gets to know Albert Neuhuys, a painter of the The Hague School, and together they make excursions to Drenthe and the Campine in Belgium. Jakob Smits becomes impressed by the Campine landscape and he establishes himself in 1888, definitively in Achterbos (Mol). He pays 2,000 Belgian francs for a small farm which he develops to his Malvinahof. In the same year he marries Malvina Dedeyn, the daughter of a Brussels lawyer, who is disinherited because of this marriage. Smits lives in poverty while he works tirelessly for what he will call my simple work, symbolic, poetic and real. In 1897, he received a gold medal for his exhibitions of large water-colour paintings on a gold background in Munich and Dresden. He also paints a lot of portraits, especially of Malvina and of their children Boby, Marguerite and Kobe. In 1899 destiny strikes: in a few days time he loses his daughter Alice and his wife. In 1901, Smits marries with Josine Van Cauteren. In the same year he holds his first individual exposition in Antwerp. There he obtains much praise of colleagues and critics but finds no buyer for his work. The exhibited work De vader van de veroordeelde (E: the father of the convict) was acquired later that year by the Museum of Brussels. Smits financial situation improved somewhat, but his family was put heavily on the test. In 1903 both his parents were ruined by a robbery and as a resulthe now had nine family members to maintain. At the request of the municipal authorities of Mol, Smits in 1907, arranged an international exhibition of artists who came to paint landscapes in Mol and its surroundings. The artist Paula Van Rompa-Zenke belonged to the arranging committee. There were no less than 68 painters participating, with Germans, Dutch, and Americans coming to Mol. The term Molse School was born. In 1910, Smits published an album with 25 engravings, which was dedicated to Queen Elisabeth. In 1912, the young Dirk Baksteen became a student of Smits. In 1914, Smits stopped with the production of art work. He became President of the Comite voor hulpverlening en voedselvoorziening van het canton Mol (E: Committee for assistance and food supplies of the canton Mol). After World War I he continued his work with a totally new vision and style as engrave and painter.
Tom Mostyn
British 1864-1930
MASACCIO
Italian Early Renaissance Painter, 1401-1428 was the first great painter of the Quattrocento period of the Italian Renaissance. His frescoes are the earliest monuments of Humanism, and introduce a plasticity previously unseen in figure painting. The name Masaccio is a humorous version of Tommaso, meaning "big", "fat", "clumsy" or "messy" Tom. The name was created to distinguish him from his principal collaborator, also called Tommaso, who came to be known as Masolino ("little/delicate Tom"). Despite his brief career, he had a profound influence on other artists. He was one of the first to use scientific perspective in his painting, employing techniques such as vanishing point in art for the first time. He also moved away from the Gothic style and elaborate ornamentation of artists like Gentile da Fabriano to a more natural mode that employed perspective for greater realism. Masaccio was born to Giovanni di Mone Cassa??i and Jacopa di Martinozzo in Castel San Giovanni di Altura, now San Giovanni Valdarno (now part of the province of Arezzo, Tuscany). His father was a notary and his mother the daughter of an innkeeper of Barberino di Mugello, a town a few miles south of Florence. His family name, Cassai, comes from the trade of his grandfather Simone and granduncle Lorenzo, who were carpenters - cabinet makers ("casse", hence "cassai"). His father died in 1406, when Tommaso was only five; in that year another brother was born, called Giovanni after the dead father. He also was to become a painter, with the nickname of "Scheggia" meaning "splinter". The mother was remarried to an elderly apothecary, Tedesco, who guaranteed Masaccio and his family a comfortable childhood.