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 :. | Portrait of Carolus-Duran | A Dinner Table at Night (The Glass of Claret) (mk18) | Gondoliers Siesta | Mrs Fiske Warren her Daughter Rachel | Madame Pierre Gautreau |
Related Artists:
Cornelis Bol
Dutch, born circa 1589-1666,Painter, etcher and draughtsman, active in London. He was probably from a family of painters originating in Mechelen who later settled in Antwerp. Bol and his wife were members of the Dutch Church in London in 1636. An etching of an Action between the Dutch and Spanish Fleets (Oxford, Bodleian Lib.) is signed and dated 1639, and a set of etchings by him after Abraham Casembrot ( fl c. 1650-75) includes a view of Lambeth Palace as well as four imaginary Mediterranean seaports. A signed drawing of the Blockhouse at Gravesend is in the British Museum, London. George Vertue saw at Wotton House, Bucks, 'three views of London from the River side Arundel House Somersett house Tower Lond. painted before the fire of London by Cornelius Boll: a good free taste'. They were probably commissioned by John Evelyn, the diarist, around 1660 and descended in the Evelyn family. Their attribution to Bol is confirmed by a signed version of Somerset House (London, Dulwich Pict. Gal.). Although Bol was only moderately accomplished, he was able to reproduce the distinctive light and character of the River Thames and to render the riverside and its landmarks with much topographical detail; his pictures make pleasing visual documents. The handling of the naval craft is identical in a small signed oil panel of an Action between Dutch and Spanish Ships (Amsterdam, Rijksmus.) and in other marine subjects that have appeared in London salerooms. According to Immerzeel, Bol was still working in London at the time of the Great Fire in 1666.
Antonio Vaz
painted A Virgem com o Menino in 1540
Adolph Tiedeman
1814-1876