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 :. | mme edouard pailleron | Lady Astor | The Guidecca | madame x | Mrs Charles Russell |
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Samuel King
1748-1819 Samuel King Gallery American painter, carver and nautical instrument maker. He was the son of Benjamin King, a mathematical and nautical instrument maker of Newport, RI. Samuel King's early portrait of the Rev. Ezra Stiles (New Haven, CT, Yale U. A.G.) is undoubtedly his masterpiece and a tour de force of symbolism. The portrait was begun in 1770 and completed on 1 August 1771. It shows the interest of the instrument maker in detail and exactitude of delineation. King's other known portraits show no such originality and in the main reflect compositions taken from portraits known to have been hanging in Newport at the time or from English prints. Since Samuel King and Charles Bird King (unrelated) were neighbours on Clarke Street in Newport, he probably influenced Charles Bird King. Washington Allston and Ann Hall (1792-1863) were both Samuel King's pupils.
Medardo Rosso
1858 Turin-1928 Milan,was an Italian sculptor. He is thought to have developed the Post Impressionism style in sculpture along with Auguste Rodin. Medardo Rosso was born in Turin, Italy, in 1858, the son of the city stationmaster. Later his family mover to Milano (Milan). As a child Rosso played hooky from school to visit a monument mason who taught him to handle a chisel and hammer. This distressed and angered his parents. At the age of 23, after a period of military service as unsatisfactory as his home life, he enrolled at the Berea Academy in Milano, where he learned to draw classical statues and copy them in gesso. But academic art appeared to him entirely artificial, unrelated to the world around him. Before long he helped to organize the Berea students into demanding life models for the drawing classes. As a result of his revolutionary behavior he was expelled from the school. He moved to Rome, where he lived in great poverty, sleeping among the ruins of the Colosseum. To the end of his life Rosso battled unremittingly against the academicians. What absorbed, even obsessed, him was the problem of interpreting life itself. In 1882, some time before he saw any Impressionist paintings, he produced his fully impressionistic sculptures, The Street Singer and Lovers under the Lamplight. In 1884 some friends arranged an exhibition for him in Paris, where he lived for a time in a cheap boarding-house.
Gustav Graef
(December 14, 1821 in Königsberg - January 6, 1895 in Berlin) was a German painter, primarily of portraits and historical subjects. He studied with Theodor Hildebrandt and Friedrich Wilhelm Schadow at the Kunstakademie Desseldorf. His son Botho Graef became an art historian of some note, and his daughter was the painter Sabine Lepsius.