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 :. | Carmela Bertagna by John Singer Sargent | Villa di Marlia | Mis. Hamihedun | TRSargent | Paul Helleu |
Related Artists:
Henri-Horace Roland de La Porte
Paris 1724-1793 French painter. He was a pupil of Jean-Baptiste Oudry and was approved by the Academie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in 1761 as a 'painter of animals and fruit'. He presented his morceau de reception, the ambitious Vase of Lapis, Ornamented with Bronze and Placed near a Globe (Paris, Louvre), in 1763. This large painting is reminiscent of Oudry's work and depicts a collection of sumptuous objects against a simple cloth backdrop. Roland de la Porte's later works are much more intimate in scale and approach and depict simple rustic objects in a restrained yet realistic fashion in a manner akin to Chardin, for whose works his own have been mistaken. The Still-life with Bread and Fruit (Rotterdam, Boymans-van Beuningen) is bathed in a warm light; the composition is unusual in that the bread, plums and preserve pot are represented at the viewer's eye level, obscuring the top of the table. The Little Orange Tree (Karlsruhe, Staatl. Ksthalle) uses several devices similar to those used by Chardin: a light source comes from the upper left-hand side, throwing some of the surfaces into relief and highlighting them against the indistinct background; a single straw is brought into focus and seems to protrude out of the picture
Regis-Francois Gignoux
1816-1882 French/American Regis-Francois Gignoux Gallery French painter who was active in the United States from 1840 to 1870. He was born in Lyon, France and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts under with the French painter Paul Delaroche (1797-1856). Gignoux arrived in the United States from France in 1840 and opened a studio in Brooklyn, New York. He was a member of the National Academy of Design, and was the first president of the Brooklyn Art Academy. George Inness (1825-1894) and John LaFarge (1835-1910) were both his students. Gignoux was the only member of the Hudson River School to specialize in snow scenes. He returned to France in 1870 and died in Paris in 1882. The Brooklyn Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), the Georgia Museum of Art (University Of Georgia, Athens), the High Museum of Art (Atlanta, Georgia), the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the Hood Museum of Art (Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire), the Museum of Art at Brigham Young University (Provo, Utah), the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City, Missouri), the New York Historical Society (New York City), the Parrish Art Museum (Southampton, New York), Smith College Museum of Art (Northampton, Massachusetts), the United States Capital Art Collection (Washington, D. C.), the Walters Art Museum (Baltimore, Maryland) and the Watson Gallery (Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts) are among the public collections holding work by R??gis François Gignoux.
Caravaggio
Italian Baroque Era Painter, ca.1571-1610 Italian painter. After an early career as a painter of portraits, still-life and genre scenes he became the most persuasive religious painter of his time. His bold, naturalistic style, which emphasized the common humanity of the apostles and martyrs, flattered the aspirations of the Counter-Reformation Church, while his vivid chiaroscuro enhanced both three-dimensionality and drama, as well as evoking the mystery of the faith. He followed a militantly realist agenda, rejecting both Mannerism and the classicizing naturalism of his main rival, Annibale Carracci. In the first 30 years of the 17th century his naturalistic ambitions and revolutionary artistic procedures attracted a large following from all over Europe.