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 :. | Mrs. Charles Gifford Dyer | Alice Vanderbilt Shepard | Lady Agnew of Lochnaw | Dolce Far Niente | Portrait of Miss Eden |
Related Artists:
Pekka Halonen
Pekka Halonen (23 September 1865 - 1 December 1933) was a painter of Finnish landscapes and people. He was born in Lapinlahti. He lived with his family in a home and studio on Lake Tuusula in Järvenpää, Finland that he, himself, designed and named Halosenniemi. The beautiful and serene building is now a museum that includes original furnishings and Halonenes own art on the walls. There, on the shores of Lake Tuusula where Pekka Halonen resided, an artistse community developed and flourished, helping to develop a sense of Finnish national identity. Halosenniemi was designed with the two story studios of Paris in mind with high ceilings and tall windows in the studio and second floor living quarters accessible by a set of stairs and a balcony that overlooked the studio. Adjacent to the house, Halonen built a sauna and, in typical Finnish tradition, the sauna also served as a laundry. Halonen stated that he never painted for anyone but himself. He felt that eArt should not jar the nerves like sandpaper - it should produce a feeling of peace.e His father was a peasant from Lapinlahti. Halonen studied at the Art Society's drawing school in Helsinki. In 1890 he moved to Paris where he studied at the Academie Julian and later under Paul Gauguin. He died in Tuusula. There is a painting by Pekka Halonen in the post-impressionist section of the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, Hungary. Until May 2013 in the Groninger Museum, the Netherlands: Pekka Halonen, Eero Järnefeldt, Helene Schjerfbeck and Akseli Gallen Kallela in the exhibition 'Nordic Art: The Modern Breakthrough'.
Vasily Polenov
1844 - 1927,Painter. He began a systematic study of drawing in 1856, first with the landscape painter Pavel Cherkasov (1834-1900), then from 1859 to 1861 with Pavel Chistyakov (1832-1919). He also took lessons with Chistyakov, whom he considered his most important teacher, in 1871 and early 1872, after finishing his academic course. From 1863 to 1871 Polenov studied at the St Petersburg Academy of Art, where he met members of the progressive wing of the Russian artistic intelligentsia, and occasionally in the faculty of law at St Petersburg University. The classical education he received at home, his academic training and lessons with Chistyakov led Polenov towards an exalted history painting, although he personally inclined towards landscape. This dualism remained in Polenov work for the duration, and not until the late 1880s and early 1890s did he achieve a stable relationship between the two forms. The whole of his student career and the initial postgraduate, scholarship period was largely taken up with historical works: from academic compositions, for example the Resurrection of Jairus Daughter (1871; Pskov, Mus. Hist., Archit. & A.), for which he received the Grand Gold Medal and a travel bursary (in Germany and Italy, 1872-3, and France, 1873-6), to numerous pictures and sketches on subjects from antiquity and medieval history, executed in France or shortly after his departure from there, under the perceptible influence of Paul Delaroche (e.g. The Master Right, 1874; Moscow Tret yakov Gal.). At the same time he produced his first independent works, in the 1860s and early 1870s: landscapes in the surroundings of the Imochentsy estate in Karelia (e.g. Mountains, 1870; Moscow Tret yakov Gal.), and landscape studies and pictures executed from nature in Normandy in 1874 (e.g. Fishing Boat, Etretat; Moscow, Tret'yakov Gal.). In 1876 he became an Academician
Christian Seybold
1690/7-1768 German painter, active in Austria. He went to Vienna in his youth and, apparently self-taught (Hagedorn), became a portrait-painter. His earliest known work, surviving only in an engraving (1728) by Andreas Schmutzer (1700-40) and Josef Schmutzer, is a portrait of Graf Johann Adam Questenberg in the formal Baroque style. Subsequently, under the influence of Balthasar Denner, he turned to a more intimate style of representation,