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 :. | Graveyard in the Tyrol by John Singer Sargent Private Collection | Breakfast in the Loggia | Frances Evelyn Daisy Greville | A Morning Walk | Arab Stable |
Related Artists:
Charlotte Wahlstrom
painted Lake landscape at dusk in 1887
Henri Evenepoel
Belgian, 1872-1899 was a Belgian artist whose most important works are associated with Fauvism. He first studied art in Brussels at the Acad??mie des Beaux-Arts between 1889 and 1890, and entered Paris's Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1892. Evenepoel entered the atelier of Gustave Moreau in 1893, which put him in contact with Henri Matisse and Georges Rouault. The artist debuted a portrait of his cousin (Louise in Mourning) at the 1894 Salon des Artistes Français. He showed four portraits at the Salon du Champ-de-Mars in 1895 and continued to exhibit there until his death. His first solo exhibition came at the Brussels Cercle Artistique (December 1897 C January 1898). Family and friends were the artist's preferred subjects; his full-length portraits, often against a neutral background, show the influence of Edouard Manet and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. His Parisian scenes were influenced by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec and Jean-Louis Forain.
GUARDI, Gianantonio
Italian Rococo Era Painter, ca.1699-1761