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DESCRIPTION:
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De Glehn is perhaps most famous for his association with John Singer Sargent. Born in Sydenham, England in 1870, he received his training in the Royal College of Art in South Kensington and later at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris where he studied under Gustave Moreau and Elie Delaunay. De Glehn met Sargent in 1895 through Edwin Austin Abby during his first visit to America when Sargent was working on murals in the Boston Public Library. After further work in Europe, de Glehn returned to the US in 1903 and married Jane Emmet, a member of a Boston family of painters and cousin to the novelist Henry James. Shortly afterwards the newly wed couple returned to Europe with Sargent where they embarked on many years of travel throughout Spain, Switzerland and Italy. Sargent would become renowned in the years to come. There was always a circle of other painters and artists around them, with de Glehn and Sargent always at the center, usually painting side by side from location to location, often using Mrs. De Glehn or Sargent’s sisters as models. These years were very productive and successful for de Glehn who built an impressive body of work, and always in the company of painters of the caliber of Sargent whose influence and experience were ever-present.
These years of expatriate living from 1904-1914 were a golden age for the group of which Sargent was the core. The pictures that were produced by de Glehn and these painters during this period have taken on an immortal glow for later scholars and buyers - the regal wonder of the bohemian, artistic life as the entourage moved about Venice, Florence and the Spanish provinces of Andalucia, always moving in the circles of other painters, poets, renowned travelers and the elite of the European and expatriate scenes. These were the dandified years of Oscar Wilde and Guy de Maupassant, the last days of a resplendent era, carefree and self-involved, before the attrition of First World War largely scattered it to the wind.
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