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John Singer Sargent
(Jan.12, 1856 Florence - Apr.15, 1925 London) American Oil Painting Artist Biography
John Singer Sargent was born in Florence, Italy, in 1856, the son of wealthy American expatriates. His first art lesson took place in Florence, but the family traveled around Europe for some years and settled in Paris in 1874. On a trip to Venice, Sargent had met and been encouraged by Whistler. He joined the Paris Ecole des Beaux-Arts, entering the studio of Carolus-Duran, an unimaginative but technically dexterous painter, exact in the formal organization of his subject matter. Sargent was precocious and took full advantage of the thoroughness of his training. After studying with Carolus-Duran, he achieved a great reputation for his oil portraits, employing a style that could be seen as derived from Diego Velazquez rich coloring on pale contrasting backgrounds by way of Edouard Manet. In 1877 he exhibited a portrait at the Paris Salon.
Sargent's style matured quickly. His sparkling portraits, so full of virtuosity as to be almost facile, mirror his cosmopolitan background and easy acquaintance with society. He won notoriety at the Salon of 1884, with his portrait of Madame Gautreau, a Parisian beauty and society woman. The public, the sitter, her family and the critics reacted violently to the painting, with condemnation of the "shocking" décolletage, Sargent was startled and bitterly upset.
In the 1880s he began to paint landscapes that were overtly Impressionist in technique and approach, despite a certain superficiality. At this time he visited Claude Monet at Giverny on several occasions, painting two memorable portraits of him, Claude Monet Painting at the Edge of a Wood (1885, Tate Gallery, London). Although Monet was later to deny that Sargent was an Impressionist, this was unjust, especially in relation to some of his works in the 1880s and 1890s. Indeed, Sargent's technique for painting large canvases out of doors, was to be of use to Claude Oscar Monet in his larger compositions. He moved to London, his home for the rest of his life, but often went to America. His first show there was held in January, 1888. In 1893 he exhibited nine oil paintings at the Chicago World Fair. In 1897 he was elected an academician at the National Academy of Design in New York and at the Royal Academy of Art in London, and he was made a member of the Legion of Honor in France. In 1909 he was commissioned to decorate a room in the new Public Library in Boston, Massachusetts. The resulting murals, warm, rich, and monumental, depicted the history of the Jewish and Christian religions and were the subject of continual controversy.
Sargent's decorations, 1916-25, for the dome of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts are of a very different type, light and airy. His color grew paler in these later years, his brushwork never lost its liveliness and fluidity. Sargent died in London in April, 1925, having been for many years lionized as a fashionable portrait artist.
He is often passed by, not studied or dismissed because he was never a radical artist or trend-setter. He always worked within the wide, rich textured pallet of known and established styles. Yet his brilliance was in fusing these elements together and for this he has never fully gotten credit until recently.
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