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 | Lady Speyer by John Singer Sargent | Portrait of Lisa Colt Curtis | The Sulphur Match | Morning Walk |
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Henri Martin Prints
French Post-Impressionist Painter, 1860-1943 Born in Toulouse to a French cabinet maker and a mother of Italian descent, Martin successfully persuaded his father to permit him to become an artist. He began his career in 1877 at the Toulouse School of the Fine Arts, where he was under the tutelage of Jules Garipuy (he was also a pupil of Eug??ne Delacroix). In 1879, Martin relocated to Paris and with the help of a scholarship, was able to study in Jean-Paul Laurens' studio. Four years later, he received his first medal at the Paris Salon, where he would hold his first exhibition three years later in 1886. The year after he won his first medal, Martin was awarded a scholarship for a tour in Italy, where he studied the work of veterans such as Giotto and Masaccio. His 1889 canvas submission to the Salon earned him the gold medal for work that has been described as Pointillist. That same year he became a member of the Legion of Honour. At the 1900 World Fair, he was awarded the Grand Prize for his work. During this period, he became friends with Auguste Rodin. Although Martin's work as a neo-impressionist is not considered groundbreaking, his work was rather well-received, and has been associated with world-class symbolist painter, Puvis de Chavannes. Due to his introverted temperament, Martin decided to move away from Paris. After a decade of searching for an ideal home, Martin bought Marquayrol, a mansion overlooking La Bastide du Vert, near Cahors. He performed his best work in the new tranquil environment, and died there in 1943.
Gustave Loiseau
French, 1865-1935 French painter. He was apprenticed first to a butcher and in 1880 to a house painter. It was not until 1887, when he received a small inheritance, that he was able to devote himself to painting. He spent a year studying modelling and design at the Ecole des Arts D?coratifs in Paris and then entered the studio of the French landscape painter Fernand Just Quignon (b 1854) for six months in 1889. After settling in 1890 in Pont-Aven in Brittany, where he met the painters Maxime Maufra and Henri Moret (1856-1913), he produced such carefully executed works as the Green Rocks (1893; Geneva, Petit Pal.). It was not until 1894, however, that he met Gauguin on the latter return from Tahiti, and though he did not accept Gauguin synthetist ideas the encounter led to a stronger structure and freer brushstrokes in his subsequent work.
Joseph Albrier
(1791 -1863 ) - Painter