He also exhorted them to study artists who demonstrated painterly freedom: Frans Hals and Rembrandt Sir Anthony van Dyck and Sir Joshua Reynolds and, above all others, the Spanish master Diego Velázquez. In May 1874, Sargent entered the teaching atelier of a youthful, stylish painter, Carolus-Duran, a leading portraitist in Third Republic France who encouraged his students to paint immediately (rather than make preliminary drawings), to exploit broad planes of viscous pigment, and to preserve the freshness of the sketch in completed works. In spring 1874, Fitzwilliam Sargent resolved to nourish his son’s talent in Paris, which had become the world’s most powerful magnet for art students. He enrolled for his first-documented formal art training during the winter of 1873–74 at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. His mother, an amateur artist, encouraged him to draw, and her wanderlust furnished him with subjects. He studied geography, arithmetic, reading, and other disciplines under his father’s tutelage. As a result of his “Baedeker education,” he learned Italian, French, and German. John Sargent was given little regular schooling. Their son John was born in Florence in January 1856. The Sargents’ stay in Europe was meant to be temporary, but they became expatriates, passing winters in Florence, Rome, or Nice and summers in the Alps or other cooler regions. The couple left Philadelphia for Europe in late summer 1854, seeking a healthful climate and a distraction after the death a year earlier of their firstborn child. There, his son Fitzwilliam Sargent became a physician and in 1850 married Mary Newbold Singer, daughter of a successful local merchant. His grandfather, Winthrop Sargent IV, descended from one of the oldest colonial families, had failed in the merchant-shipping business in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and had moved his family to Philadelphia. The family of John Singer Sargent (1856–1925) had deep roots in New England.
0 kommentar(er)
