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 :. | Claude Monet Painting at the Edge of a Wood (mk18) | Portrait of the 9th Duke of Marlborough with his family | The Misses Vickers | Bedouin Mother | Portrait of Jacques Emile Blanche |
Related Artists:
Christoph Franz Hillner
painted Holy night in 1767
Joseph Paelinck
Belgian Painter, 1781-1839, Flemish painter. The son of a farmer, he studied at the Academie in Ghent. He exhibited for the first time in 1802 at the Ghent Salon, then left for Paris where he was admitted into Jacques-Louis David's studio. In 1804 his Judgement of Paris (Ghent, Mus. S. Kst.) obtained a prize at the Ghent Salon. The first of numerous commissions that followed was for St Colette (1806; Ghent, St Baaf), which was in keeping with the contemporary Historicist vogue. In 1808 he was commissioned to paint a portrait of the Empress Josephine (Ghent, Mus. S. Kst.), and in the same year the town of Ghent granted him an allowance for four years of study in Rome where, with other former pupils of David, he took part in the decoration of the Palazzo del Quirinale; his contribution, Augustus Ordering the Adornment of Rome, is untraced. While in Italy he also painted a Neo-classical Invention of the Cross (1812; Ghent, St Michel), inspired by Raphael. In 1812 he returned to Ghent and in 1815 moved to Brussels to paint the portrait of William, Prince of Orange (1818; Brussels, H?tel de Ville). He painted several religious subjects, including a Crucifixion (1817; Sleidinge, St Joris) and the Disciples at Emmaus (Everghem Church), which have links with the 17th-century French tradition. Among the portraits he executed in this period is the Snoy Family
jean metzinger
Jean Metzinger (June 24, 1883 Nantes, France?C November 3, 1956) was a French painter. Initially he was influenced by Fauvism and Impressionism, but from 1908 he was associated with Cubism. Metzinger was a member of the Section d'Or group of artists. Certain pieces such as At the Cycle-Race track suggest speed and movement, ideas which are linked to the futurist movement. Together with Albert Gleizes, Metzinger created the first major treatise on Cubism, Du Cubisme, in 1912. In the latter stages of his career, he moved away from cubism towards realism, while still retaining elements of cubist style.