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 :. | Sargent emphasized Almina Wertheimer exotic beauty in 1908 by dressing her en turquerie | Portrait of the 9th Duke of Marlborough with his family | Gondoliers Siesta | Self-Portrait | Winifred Duchess of Portland |
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SANCHEZ COELLO, Alonso
Spanish Painter, ca.1531-1588 was a portrait painter of the Spanish Renaissance and one of the pioneers of the great tradition of Spanish portrait painting. Alonso Senchez Coello spent his childhood in Benifair de les Valls, until the death of his father when he was around ten years old. He was educated in Portugal at his grandfather's home. Coello's years in Portugal and his family name of Portuguese origin led to a long-standing belief that he was in fact Portuguese. His grandfather (after whom he was named) was in the service of King John III of Portugal who sent the young painter to study with Anthonis Mor (also known as Antonio Moro) in Flanders around 1550. He was under the service of Antoine de Granville, bishop of Arras, learning from Mor. While studying in Flanders, Coello also spent time copying some of Titian's works. In 1552, the painter went to Lisbon with Anthonis Mor when Charles V commissioned Mor to paint the Portuguese royal family. For a few years, Senchez Coello remained in Portugal working for the court of the heir to the throne, John, Crown Prince of Portugal. After the prince's death, Senchez Coello moved to the Spanish court of Philip II, having been recommended by the widow of John, Juana, who was the sister of the Spanish king. In 1555, S??nchez Coello was in Valladolid working for the Spanish court, and when Mor left Spain in 1561, Senchez Coello took his former master's place as Court Painter. Senchez Coello married Louisa Reyaltes in either 1560 or 1561 in Valladolid, and they had seven children. Coello's daughter, Isabel Senchez (1564-1612),
Machuca, Pedro
Spanish, approx. 1490-1550 Spanish painter and architect. The form of his signature (Petrus Machuca, Hispanus. Toletanus ...) on his earliest known work, the Virgin of Succour (1517; Madrid, Prado), suggests he was active at an early age in Italy. On the basis of the style of that work, a number of frescoes in the Vatican have been attributed to him, including Isaiah Blessing Jacob. Other works from the same period that have been attributed to him include a copy (Paris, Louvre) of the destroyed Battle of Anghiari by Leonardo da Vinci and two paintings of the Virgin and Child
SERODINE, Giovanni
Italian Baroque Era Painter, 1600-1630 Italian painter and stuccoist. His family moved from Ascona on Lake Maggiore to Rome, where his father is recorded in 1595. It is probable that Serodine was born there. His first work was probably done in association with his brother Giovanni Battista Serodine (1589/90-1630), a stuccoist active in Rome, where he carved a Virgin and Child (1614) for the fa?ade of S Francesca Romana, and in Ascona, where he restored the family home and decorated it with stucco (1620). The design and stucco decoration of the church of the Madonna della Fortuna on Monte Verit? (Ascona) are attributed to him, though it is probable that Giovanni (who is recorded in Ascona in 1620) collaborated in the work. The first of Giovanni's documented official commissions, however, was for the stucco decoration and apsidal paintings in the chuch of the Concezione at Spoleto, where he worked with Sante Ghezzi (Corradini; Toscano). These murals, painted in tempera and completed in July 1624, are sketchy and clumsily executed, quite distinct in their inferior quality and naive piety from the rest of Serodine's work. They are probably his first attempts at painting,