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 :. | Black Tent | Portrait of Elizabeth Allen Marquand | Sir Frank Swettenham | Oyster Gatherers of Cancale | Ramon Subercaseaux |
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Knud Bergslien
(May 15, 1827 - November 27, 1908) was a Norwegian painter, art teacher and master artist. In his art, he frequently portrayed the lives of the Norwegian people, their history and heroes of the past. Bergslien is most associated with his historical paintings, especially Skiing Birchlegs Crossing the Mountain with the Royal Child. Knud Larsen Bergslien was born in Voss, in Hordaland, Norway. His parents were Lars Bergeson Bergslien and Kirsten Knutsdotter Gjelle. Knud Bergslien was the brother of sculptor Brynjulf Bergslien and uncle of painter and sculptor Nils Bergslien. Monuments honoring the three famous Bergslien artists now exist in Bergslien park located in Voss, Hordaland
Ranney William Tylee
German-born American Painter, 1813-1857 American painter. He spent six formative years in the hill country of North Carolina. By 1834 he was working and studying drawing in New York, but two years later he went to Texas to join in the war for independence. Although he returned to New York a year later, it was not until 1846, with the outbreak of the Mexican War, that Ranney began to use his Western experience as the basis for his painting. With the encouragement of the American Art Union, he executed three types of Western subject: the Western trapper or hunter, pursuing a dangerous life on the prairies, as in Trapper's Last Shot (1850; untraced; engraved and lithographed by T. Dwight Booth); the pioneer family, heading across the plains with children, dogs and goods, as in Advice on the Prairie (1853; Malvern, PA, Claude J. Ranney priv. col.); and the dangers of emigration, for example Prairie Fire.
Ernest Walbourn
1871-1927