John Singer Sargent

1 Pages 346 Words

Perhaps one of the most well-known painters of the 19th and early 20th centuries, John Singer Sargent specialized in portraiture of the more influential and well off men and women of the era. Presidents Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt, oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller, novelists Robert Louis Stevenson and Henry James, actress Ellen Terry and art patron Isabella Stewart Gardner all sruck their best poses for him.
Raised in Europe by an American emigrant family, Sargent attended art schools in Paris. Extremely gifted, he soon received lessons from the old masters, the contemporary Impressionists and the Spanish painters Velázquez and Goya, producing a spectacular array of exciting and masterful paintings while only in his 20s. At the 1884 Paris Salon, however, his portrait of the 23-year-old American Virginie Gautreau, shown with bare shoulders, overflowing bosom and haughty manner, scandalized the Paris establishment. The picture, which became known as Madame X, crippled Sargent's hopes of establishing himself as a portrait painter in Paris. In 1886 he moved to London, and in just a few years became the most admired and sought-after portrait painter in Britain and the United States.
But Sargent was much more than a portrait painter. He was also a terrific landscape and figure artist, producing more than 1,000 dazzling oils and watercolors. For example, his Valdemosa, Majorca which is a watercolor of Brush and Thistles shown on a hillside. Although the paniting is very impressionistic, the lighter colors of the leaves really bring the brush forward towards the onlooker’s eye. He tends to fill the entire space on the paper with his dark backgrounds contrasted against his lighter foregrounds. He uses a great mixture of warm colors to show where the sunlit sky shines towards the brush.
I have always been one whom enjoys impressionist pieces of work, but Sargent’s paintings have always stood out to me from the rest. ...