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 :. | A Boating Party (mk18) | Alice Wernher born Alice Sedgwick Mankiewicz | Lady with a Parasol | Camp at Lake O'Hara (mk18) | Mrs Edward D.Boit (Mary Louisa Cushing) (mk18) |
Related Artists:
Guido da Siena
Italian Byzantine Style Painter, 13th Century He may have made significant advances in the techniques of painting, much as Cimabue much later accomplished. However, there is some debate about this. Guido is primarily known for a painting which is now split into several pieces. The church of S. Domenico in Siena contains a large painting of the Virgin and Child Enthroned with six angels above. The Benedictine convent of the same city has a triangular pinnacle representing the Saviour in benediction, with two angels. This was once a portion of the same composition, which was originally a triptych. The principal section of this picture has a rhymed Latin inscription, giving the painter's name as Guido de Senis, with the date 1221. However, this may not be genuine, and the date may really read as 1281. There is nothing particular to distinguish this painting from other work of the same period except that the heads of the Virgin and Child are much superior ?C in natural character and graceful dignity ?C to anything painted before Cimabue. As a result, there is some dispute as to whether these heads are really the work of a man who painted in 1221, long before Cimabue. Crowe and Cavalcaselle have proposed that the heads were repainted in the 14th century, perhaps by Ugolino da Siena. If Crowe and Cavalcaselle are right, Cimabue maintains his claim to the advancement of the art. Beyond this, little is known of Guido da Siena. A picture in the Academy of Siena is attributed to him (a half-figure of the Virgin and Child, with two angels), which dates (probably) between 1250 and 1300.
Henri Testelin
(Paris, 1616 - The Hague, 1695) was a French art painter. Henri Testelin made portraits of Louis XIV, important persons and events at the French court . Several of his paintings can be seen in the palace of Versailles. The portraits, like the one of the young Louis XIV, show the influence of Jean Nocret and Le Brun. He was secretary of Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture from 1650 and professor from 1656. In 1680 he published a book on art theory and the academy. Testelin was dismissed from the Academy in 1681, because he was proptestant. He left France and went to Holland.
Alexej Kondratjewitsch Sawrassow
Alexei Kondratyevich Savrasov (Russian) (May 24, 1830 - October 8, 1897) was a Russian landscape painter and creator of the lyrical landscape style. Savrasov was born into the family of a merchant. He began to draw early and in 1838 he enrolled as a student of professor Rabus at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (graduated in 1850), and immediately began to specialize in landscape painting. In 1852, he traveled to Ukraine. Then, in 1854 by the invitation of the Grand Duchess Maria Nikolayevna, President of the Imperial Academy of Arts, he moved to the neighborhood of St. Petersburg. In 1857, Savrasov became a teacher at the Moscow School of painting, sculpturing and architecture. His best disciples, Isaac Levitan and Konstantin Korovin, remembered their teacher with admiration and gratitude.