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 :. | In the Generalife (mk18) | Robert de Cevrieux | Mrs. Charles Thursby | Bedouins | The Daughters of Edward D.Boit |
Related Artists:
Pieter Lodewyk Kuhnen
painted Romantic Rhine landscape with ruin at sunset in 19th century
KETEL, Cornelis
Dutch painter (b. 1548, Gouda, d. 1616, Amsterdam). Dutch painter, draughtsman and sculptor, active also in France and England. He was one of the most important portrait and narrative painters of the Dutch Mannerist school of the late 16th century and the early 17th. He received his earliest training in Gouda from his uncle Cornelis Jacobsz. Ketel (d c. 1568) and studied for a year with the painter Anthonie Blocklandt in Delft c. 1565. Ketel then travelled to France and lived in Paris and Fontainebleau.
gabriele munter
Gabriele Munter (1877 - 1962) was a German expressionist painter who was at the forefront of the Munich avant-garde in the early 20th century.Gabriele Meenter was born in Berlin and showed an interest in art from a young age. She received private tuition in drawing and attended the local Women Artists School, as she was unable to enroll in the German art academies because she was a woman. Meenter left Berlin to attend the progressive Phalanx School in Munich. There she studied sculpture, printmaking and painting and in 1902 began a very intimate and personal relationship with the School director Wassily Kandinsky; they were later engaged to be married. In 1911 they founded the avant-garde expressionist group known as Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) group.During World War I the couple left Germany to take refuge in Switzerland, but since Kandinsky was Russian he was forced to return to Moscow in 1914. He divorced and remarried while in Russia and never saw Meenter again. She returned to Germany following the war but was relatively inactive in the arts again until the 1920s. During World War II she hid Kandinsky works and those of other members of the Blue Rider from the Nazis. She died in 1962 in Murnau am Staffelsee.