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 :. | Millicent Duches of Sutherland | Portrait of Dorothy Barnard | Karer See | Frederick Law Olmsted | Lady Eden |
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charles burney
Period: Classical (1750-1819) Country: England Born: April 07, 1726 Died: April 12, 1814 in Chelsea
Anna Maria Ehrenstrahl
1666-1729,as married Wattrang, (1666-1729), was Swedish painter, the first female painter in her country. She was a baroque-artist and painted allegorys, portraits and group portraits in the style of the Baroque. Born as child of the court painter David Klocker Ehrenstrahl and Maria Momma, she was instructed as a student by her father to copy and finish his works and to paint details and other such smaller things to complete the paintings in his studio. She is confirmed as her fathers assistant from ca 1680. Her learning as an artist was therefore not complete, as he never intended her to become an independent artist, just as a form of artistic secretary in his studio, but she was in fact to create paintings herself eventually. In 1688 she married Johan Wattrang, vice president in Svea Hovratt, and painted six portraits of this courts former presidents, which she gave the court signed with her own name (1717). Her way of painting was in the same barocque style as her father; she painted allergorys and portraits of both single people and groups, bot real people and mytholocigal figures in the style of the time. Among them was portraits of king Charles XI of Sweden, Prince Ulrik (in 1685), an allegory over the four seasons (1687) and an allegory of Cupid and Psyche. She painted the four king's under her lifetime, the Princes Gustaf and Fredrik, Ulrika Eleonora of Denmark and Aurora Konigsmarck.
Pieter Wouwerman
1623-1682