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 :. | Polly Barnard | Venetian Loggia | Portrait of Almina Daughter of Asher Wertheimer | The Misses Vickers | Mrs. Frederick Meade |
Related Artists:
Maler, Hans
Austrian, Active 1500-29
Grace Hudson
(1865 - 1937) was an American painter. She was nationally known during her lifetime for a numbered series of more than 684 portraits of the local Pomo Indians. She painted the first, "National Thorn", after her marriage in 1891, and the last in 1935. Grace Carpenter was born in Potter Valley, California. Her mother was one of the first white school teachers educating Pomo children and was a commercial portrait photographer in Ukiah, California; her father was a skilled panoramic and landscape photographer who chronicled early Mendocino County frontier enterprises such as logging, shipping and railroading. At fourteen years of age, Grace was sent to attend the recently-established San Francisco School of Design, an art school which emphasized painting from nature rather than from memory or by copying existing works. At sixteen, she executed an award-winning, full length, life sized self-portrait in crayon. While in San Francisco, she met and eloped with a man fifteen years her senior named William Davis, upsetting her parents and ending her formal studies. The marriage lasted only a year. From 1885 to 1890, Grace Carpenter Davis lived with her parents in Ukiah painting, teaching and rendering illustrations for magazines such as Cosmopolitan and Overland Monthly. Her work at that time had no particular focus and included genre, landscapes, portraits and still lifes in all media. Later in her career she would continue to accept occasional magazine illustration assignments including ones for Sunset.
BOSSCHAERT, Ambrosius the Elder
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1573-1621 Painter and dealer. He left Antwerp with his parents c. 1587 because as Protestants they were vulnerable to religious persecution; the family moved to Middelburg, where in 1593 Ambrosius became a member of the Guild of St Luke, of which he served as Dean on several occasions (1597, 1598, 1603, 1604, 1612 and 1613). In 1604 he married Maria van der Ast, the sister of Balthasar van der Ast who later became his pupil and possible collaborator. Bosschaert bought a house in Middelburg in 1611. There are flower-pieces by Bosschaert that are signed (with a monogram) and dated between 1605 and 1621, though there were two periods of artistic inactivity, in 1611-13 and 1615-16, when he was probably more active as a dealer in the art of both Dutch and foreign artists (e.g. Veronese and Georg Flegel). He was recorded in Bergen-op-Zoom in 1615 and became a citizen of Utrecht in 1616, where his name appears in the register of the Utrecht Guild of St Luke for the same year. In 1619 he was involved in a court case in Breda, where he lived from that year. He died during a journey to The Hague.