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 :. | Portrait of Millicent Leveson-Gower | Villa di Marlia | Ramon Subercaseaux | From the Gondola | Lisa Colt Curtis |
Related Artists:
Richard Cosway
English Rococo Era Miniaturist, 1742-1821,Painter, draughtsman, dealer and collector. Probably the son of a schoolmaster, he showed a precocious talent for drawing and studied at Shipley's Drawing School in the Strand, where he won several prizes. He attended the Richmond House academy, set up by Charles Lennox, 3rd Duke of Richmond, where he met Giovanni Battista Cipriani. He first exhibited at the Society of Artists in 1760, showing there again between 1767 and 1779. He also showed at the Free Society of Artists between 1761 and 1766. In 1769 he entered the Royal Academy Schools, becoming an ARA in 1770, when he began to exhibit at the Academy, and RA the following year. In 1781 Cosway married the Anglo-Florentine artist Maria Cosway, n?e Hadfield, and they moved in 1784 to Schomberg House, Pall Mall, which became a centre for fashionable London society. In 1786 he made a brief visit to Paris and in 1791 he moved to a larger house in Stratford Place, London.
Nils Hansteen
(1855-1912) was a Norwegian painter. Nils Hansteen was born in Mo i Rana, in the county of Nordland, Norway. He attended the painting school of Knud Bergslien from 1873 and Peder Thurmann Cappelen (1874-1975). He later studied under Hans Gude in Karlsruhe from 1876 to 1877. He then lived in Munich (1877-1880), Italy (1880-1881) and Copenhagen (1887-1892). He was known principally as a landscape and marine painter. He painted in a naturalistic style, with motifs from marine and forest environments. Two of his paintings are owned by the National Gallery of Norway.
PALAGI, Pelagio
1775-1860 Italian painter, architect, designer and collector. At the age of 12 he began to frequent the house in Bologna of his patron Conte Carlo Filippo Aldrovandi Marescotti (1763-1823), whose collections and library provided his early artistic education and engendered his taste for collecting. From 1795 he worked on several decorative schemes with the theatre designer and decorator Antonio Basoli (1774-1848), and it was perhaps in theatre designs that Palagi was first exposed to an eclectic range of motifs from exotic cultures. He was influenced by the linear, mannered style of Felice Giani, with whom he frequented the important evening drawing sessions at the house of the engraver Francesco Rosaspina (1762-1841). Beginning in 1802, he participated in the informal Accademia della Pace, Bologna, as well as studying at the Accademia Clementina, and was elected to the Accademia Nazionale di Belle Arti of Bologna in 1803. Soon his draughtsmanship took on a bizarre, brooding style akin to that of Piranesi and such early Romantics as Luigi Sabatelli and Henry Fuseli. During this period he began designing funerary monuments, a type of commission that he continued to receive throughout his life. In 1805 he worked with Giani on the decorations of the Palazzo Aldini, Bologna.