The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists (440 page)

(1864–1934).
French
naïve
painter. After being orphaned very young, she passed her youth as a farm-hand and later entered domestic service in Senlis. She began painting when she was about 40 and was ‘discovered’ by Wilhelm
Uhde
in 1912. Her pictures are mainly fantastic, minutely detailed compositions of fruit, leaves, and flowers. She was intensely devout and painted in a trance-like state of religious ecstasy, regarding her works as offerings to the Virgin Mary. In the late 1920s her reason began to fail and she became obsessed with visions of the end of the world. She died in a home for the aged at Clermont.

 
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(1740–1814).
German-born Swedish sculptor, active mainly in Stockholm. His early works are in a French
Rococo
style, but he abandoned this during the period he spent in Rome (1767–78) and became the leading Swedish exponent of
Neoclassicism
. He was a much livelier artist than many Neoclassical sculptors, however, and although his mature work has impressive clarity of form, it also possesses warmth and vitality. In Rome he was best known for his spirited sketches in clay and
terracotta
, but after his return to Sweden he was mainly a portraitist. He was court sculptor to Gustavus III and his most important work is a bronze statue of the king (1790–1808) in front of the Royal Palace in Stockholm. Sergel was a prolific draughtsman, many of his drawings being
Romantic
in spirit, in a style similar to those of
Fuseli
, who was a friend during his period in Rome.

 
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Serial art
.

A branch of
Minimal art
, in which simple, uniform elements, which may be commercially available objects such as bricks, cement blocks, etc., are assembled in accordance with a strict modular principle. Carl
Andre
is a noted exponent of Serial art. The term came into common use in the late 1960s.

 
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serigraphy
.

See
SILK-SCREEN PRINTING
.

 
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(1865–1911).
Russian painter and graphic artist, son of the composer Alexander Serov . He studied privately under
Repin
and then in 1880–5 at the Academy in St Petersburg, where he became a friend of
Vrubel
. His work includes landscapes, genre pictures, and historical scenes, as well as book illustrations, but he is best known as a portraitist. In this field he was the greatest Russian painter of his time and a match for any artist in the world. Like
Sargent
, he was a cosmopolitan figure, used to moving in high society, and he brought to his work something of the same quality of aristocratic authority and poise associated with the American's portraits. Like Sargent , too, he painted with superb technical freedom and finesse, and he was just as good with informal portraits as with grand showpieces. His two most famous paintings (both in the Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow) are intimate early works, the breathtakingly beautiful
Girl with Peaches
(1887) and the almost equally lovely
Girl in the Sunshine
(1888); later, as his fame grew, he painted many of the leading Russian celebrities of his time, particularly artists, musicians, and writers. Serov was a member of the
World of Art
group and some of his later work shows a tendency towards flat
Art Nouveau
stylization. The most remarkable example is a nude, almost monochromatic portrait of the dancer Ida Rubinstein (Russian Museum, St Petersburg), painted in Paris in 1910. Serov had a difficult personality (he could be gloomy and rude), but he was greatly admired for the integrity and sincerity of his work.

 
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