John Heartfield :: Essays Papers

John vocalist Sargent Recognized as the pencil lead portraitist in England and the United States at the turn of the century, John Singer Sargent was acclaimed for his elegant and very stylish depictions of high society. Known for his technical ability, he shunned traditional academic precepts in favor of a modern cuddle towards technique, color and form, thereby making his own special contribution to the story of grand manner portraiture. A true cosmopolite, he was also a painter of plain air landscapes and genre scenes, drawing his drug-addicteds from such several(a) locales as England, France, Italy and Switzerland. In so doing, Sargent also played a alert role in the history of British and American Impressionism. Sargent was born in Florence in 1856. He was the first child of Dr. Fitzwilliam Sargent, a surgeon from an antiquated New England family, and Mary Newb senescent Singer, the daughter of a Philadelphia merchant. His parents were among the many prosperous Americans who pick out an outcast-like lifestyle during the later nineteenth century. Indeed, Sargents family traveled constantly throughout the Continent and in England, a mode of living that enriched Sargent both culturally and socially. He ultimately became fluent in French, Italian and German, in accession to English. Having developed an interest in drawing as a boy, Sargent veritable his earliest formal instruction in Rome in 1869, where he was taught by the German-American landscape painter Carl Welsch. Following this, he tended to(p) the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence during 1873-74. In the spring of 1874, Sargents family moved to Paris, enabling him to hold out his training there. He soon entered the studio of Charles-Emile-Auguste Carolus-Duran. In contrast to to the highest degree French academic painters, Carolus-Duran taught his students to paint directly on the canvas, capturing the essence of his subject throug h relaxed brushwork, a tonal palette and strong chiaroscuro. Although Sargent also spend four years studying drawing under Lon Bonnat at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, it was Carolus-Durans approach that would form the aesthetic prat of his style. Upon his teachers advice, Sargent also traveled to Spain and Holland to study the work of old master painters such as Diego Velzquez and Frans Hals, both of whom also employed skilled, silver techniques.