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 :. | Mrs George Swinton | Bedouin Women | Madame X | Landscape with Goatherd (mk18) | Elizabeth Winthrop Chanler |
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Isaac Grunewald
Swedish, 1889-1946,was a Swedish-Jewish Expressionist painter born in Stockholm. Having studied at a Swedish art school, at age nineteen Gr??newald travelled to Paris to study under Henri Matisse. In 1909 he gained recognition in his homeland when he exhibited his work at Halldins konsthandel. He met Fauvist painter Sigrid Hjert??n, who had studied at the College of Crafts and Design in Stockholm, and encouraged her to return with him to study in Paris. Married in 1911, they became part of a group of Scandinavian artists known as "De Unga" (The Young Ones). The Crane (1915) by Isaac GrunewaldGrenewald and Hjerten regularly exhibited together at home and abroad and art historians now often cite them as being responsible for introducing modernism to Sweden. At a time in history when anti-Semitism was widespread and women in art were frowned upon, although widely known they were never fully accepted by the artistic community of the day and their works were often the subject of ridicule. Partly as a result of this, Isaac Grunewald had to supplement his income creating stage designs for the Royal Dramatic Theatre and the Royal Swedish Opera. He decorated the walls and ceiling of an auditorium (since renamed Grunewald Hall) at the Stockholm Concert Hall, site of the Nobel Prize ceremony, and the walls of the Matchstick Palace. The author of numerous essays on art, with his 1918 exhibit at Stockholm's Liljevalchs Konsthall Isaac Grunewald published his manifesto on Expressionism and opened his own art school. During the Second World War Grunewald worked at the renowned Rorstrand porcelain factory. His wife Sigrid Hjerten suffered from lifelong mental health problems frequently evidenced by anxiety and paranoia that resulted in her being hospitalized for extended periods in the 1930s. During the marriage the couple were frequently apart from each other for long periods and they separated permanently in 1937 and soon divorced. Isaac Grunewald remarried and in 1946 both he and his second wife were killed in an airplane crash. He is buried in Stockholm's Norra begravningsplatsen ("Northern Cemetery"). His 1912 self-portrait and his 1915 painting "The Singing Tree" appeared on Swedish postage stamps. Today, institutions such as the Arken Museum of Modern Art in Ishoj, Denmark rank Grunewald and Hjerten among the 20th Century's most important Scandinavian artists.
Jan Fyt
1611-1661 Flemish Jan Fyt Gallery Flemish painter, draughtsman and etcher. He was apprenticed in Antwerp in 1621-2 to Hans van den Berch [Berghe] (not to be confused with Jan van den Bergh of Alkmaar) and probably completed his training with Frans Snyders. In 1629-30 Fyt became a master in the Antwerp Guild of St Luke, but he continued to work for Snyders until 1631. In 1633 and 1634 he was in Paris. According to his biographers, he then went to Italy; an Italian journey is confirmed by the fact that in 1650 he joined the Antwerp Guild of Romanists (exclusive to those who had visited Rome), of which he became the dean in 1652. He apparently worked in Rome, where he joined the Schildersbent and was given the nickname Goudvink (Dut.: goldfinch). In Venice, according to Orlandi, Fyt worked for the Sagredo and Contarini families. He is also thought to have visited Naples, Florence and Genoa, and Orlandi stated that he also went to Spain and London. By 5 September 1641 Fyt was back in Antwerp, where, apart from a brief trip to the northern Netherlands in 1642, he apparently remained for the rest of his career. However, Jan-Erasmus Quellinus stated that he again travelled to Italy in the 1650s, a claim supported to some extent by the mention in 1671 of a Self-portrait (untraced) supposedly painted some 20 years earlier in Venice (see 1977 exh. cat.).
Henry Scott Tuke
British Painter and photographer , 1858-1929 English painter. He entered the Slade School of Art, London, in 1875, under Alphonse Legros and Sir Edward Poynter. In 1877 he won a Slade scholarship and in 1880 travelled to Italy, where he made his first nude life drawings, an important revelation to him of light, colour and the human form. From 1881 to 1883 he was in Paris and met Jules Bastien-Lepage, who encouraged his studies en plein air.