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 :. | Boats at Anchor | Portrait of Edouard and Marie Loise Pailleron | The Boating Party | The Breakfast Table | Ralph Curtis on the Beach in Scheveningen |
Related Artists:
William Dyce
1806-1864 Scottish painter, educationalist, theorist and designer. The son of a lecturer in medicine at Marischal College, Aberdeen, he studied medicine and theology, obtaining his Master's degree in 1823. Episcopalian by upbringing, Dyce was expected, like his cousin, the scholar and bibliophile Alexander Dyce (1798-1869), to proceed to Oxford to take orders. His early interest in art found an outlet in portraiture, his first commission being Sir James M. D. M'Grigor (1823; U. Aberdeen). His first attempt at history painting, The Infant Hercules Strangling the Serpents sent by Juno to Destroy Him (1824; Edinburgh, N.G.), much influenced by Reynolds, was shown to Sir Thomas Lawrence, who is said to have encouraged Dyce to enter the Royal Academy Schools in 1825. After a few months he set off for Rome in the company of Alexander Day;
Jean Francois de troy
French Neoclassical Painter, 1679-1752 was a French Rococo painter and tapestry designer. He was one of a family of painters, being the son of the portrait painter François de Troy (1645-1730), under whom he first studied, and at whose expense he went to Italy 1699-1706, staying in Rome, but also visiting many north Italian cities. Jean François de Troy was born on January 27, 1679 in Paris. The successful career of Jean François de Troy was based initially on large historical and allegorical compositions, such as Time Unveiling Truth (1733) in the National Gallery, London, but he is now most highly regarded for his smaller and more spirited scenes of elegant social life. They are among the best of those that rode on the wave of Watteau's success indeed The Alarm, or the Gouvernante Fidele (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1723) was attributed to Watteau in the 19th century. A versatile artist, he made tableaux de modes famous, painting histories and mythologies in a colourful and fluent manner which owed something to both Veronese and Peter Paul Rubens. He undertook commissions for Versailles and Fontainebleau between 1724 and 1737, and designed two sets of tapestries for the Gobelins, each of seven subjects, the Histoire d'Esther (1737-40) and the Histoire de Jason (1743-6).
Jerzy Siemiginowski-Eleuter
(ca. 1660 - ca. 1711) was a prominent Polish painter and engraver of the Baroque, court painter of king John III Sobieski and a Polish-Lithuanian noble. He is considered one of the most accomplished painters of Classical Baroque in Poland, who joined in his works classical theory with genuine motives.