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 :. | Portrait of Almina Daughter of Asher Wertheimer | Fete Familiale | Chiron and Achilles | Portrait of Sarah Choate Sears | Moorish Buildings in Sunlight (mk18) |
Related Artists:
BORDONE, Paris
Italian High Renaissance Painter, 1500-1571 Bordone was born at Treviso, but had moved to Venice by late adolescence. He apprenticed briefly and unhappily (according to Vasari) with Titian. Vasari may have met the elder Bordone. From the 1520s, we have works by Bordone including the Holy Family in Florence, Sacra Conversazione with Donor (Glasgow), and Holy Family with St. Catherine (Hermitage Museum). The St. Ambrose and a Donor (1523) is now in Brera. In 1525-6, Bordone painted an altarpiece for the church of S. Agostino in Crema, a Madonna with St. Christopher and St George (now in the Palazzo Tadini collection at Lovere). A second altarpiece, Pentecost, is now in Brera gallery. In 1534-5, he painted his large-scale masterpiece for the Scuola di San Marco a canvas of the Fisherman delivering the Marriage Ring of Venice to the Doge (Accademia). However, when this latter painting is compared to the near-contemoporary, and structurally similar, Presentation of the Virgin, Bordone's limitations, his use of superior perspective, which creates dwarfed distant perspectives, and limited coloration relative to the brilliant tints of Titian. Bordone is best at his smaller cabinet pieces, showing half-figures, semi-undressed men and women from mythology or religious stories in a muscular interaction despite the crowded space.
Edward Beyer
painted The Peaks of Otter and the Town of Liberty in 1855
Fritz von Uhde
German, 1848-1911 was a German painter of genre and religious subjects. His style lay between Realism and .Uhde was born in Wolkenburg, Saxony. In 1866 he was admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden, but later that year he left his studies for military service, and from 1867 to 1877 he was a professor of horsemanship to the regiment of the assembled guard. He moved to Munich in 1877 to attend the Academy of Fine Arts. In Munich he particularly admired the Dutch old masters, and in 1879 he travelled to Paris where his studies of the Dutch painters continued under Mihely Munkecsy's supervision. In 1882 a journey to Holland brought about a change in his style, as he abandoned the dark chiaroscuro he had learned in Munich in favor of a colorism informed by the works of the French Impressionists. His work was often rejected by the official art criticism, and by the public, because his representations of ordinary scenes were considered vulagar or ugly. The critic Otto Julius Bierbaum was more sympathetic; in 1893, he wrote, "As a painter of children, for example, Uhde is extraordinarily distinguished. He does not depict them as sweetly as used to be popular; in other words not as amusing or charming dolls, but with extreme, very strict naturalness." In about 1890, Uhde became a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.