British 1723-1792 Sir Joshua Reynolds Locations Reynolds was born in Plympton, Devon, on 16 July 1723. As one of eleven children, and the son of the village school-master, Reynolds was restricted to a formal education provided by his father. He exhibited a natural curiosity and, as a boy, came under the influence of Zachariah Mudge, whose Platonistic philosophy stayed with him all his life. Showing an early interest in art, Reynolds was apprenticed in 1740 to the fashionable portrait painter Thomas Hudson, with whom he remained until 1743. From 1749 to 1752, he spent over two years in Italy, where he studied the Old Masters and acquired a taste for the "Grand Style". Unfortunately, whilst in Rome, Reynolds suffered a severe cold which left him partially deaf and, as a result, he began to carry a small ear trumpet with which he is often pictured. From 1753 until the end of his life he lived in London, his talents gaining recognition soon after his arrival in France. Reynolds worked long hours in his studio, rarely taking a holiday. He was both gregarious and keenly intellectual, with a great number of friends from London's intelligentsia, numbered amongst whom were Dr Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, Giuseppe Baretti, Henry Thrale, David Garrick and fellow artist Angelica Kauffmann. Because of his popularity as a portrait painter, Reynolds enjoyed constant interaction with the wealthy and famous men and women of the day, and it was he who first brought together the famous figures of "The" Club. With his rival Thomas Gainsborough, Reynolds was the dominant English portraitist of 'the Age of Johnson'. It is said that in his long life he painted as many as three thousand portraits. In 1789 he lost the sight of his left eye, which finally forced him into retirement. In 1791 James Boswell dedicated his Life of Samuel Johnson to Reynolds. Reynolds died on 23 February 1792 in his house in Leicester Fields, London. He is buried in St. Paul's Cathedral.  Related Paintings of Sir Joshua Reynolds :. | Portrait of Admiral Viscount Keppel | Portrait of Princess Sophia Matilda of Gloucester | Elizabeth, Lady Amherst | Lady Bampfylde | rebecca, viscountess folkestone |
Related Artists:
Carl Philipp Fohr
German, 1795-1818,German painter and draughtsman. His first drawing lessons, from the age of 13, were from Friedrich Rottmann (1768-1816), the father of the painter Carl Rottmann. In 1810 the Darmstadt Court Councillor, Georg Wilhelm Issel, discovered Fohr sketching at Stift Neuberg near Heidelberg and, the following year, invited him to Darmstadt and provided encouragement and financial support. From 1813 Fohr carried out commissions for Grand Duchess Wilhelmina of Hesse, for whom he produced a Sketchbook of the Neckar Region, a collection of views and historical subjects (30 watercolours; 1813-14) and also a Baden Sketchbook (30 watercolours, 1814-15; both Darmstadt, Hess. Landesmus.). These far surpassed the usual level attained in this genre in their sharpness of detail, delicacy of colour and pictorial inventiveness. The Crown Princess granted him an annual pension of 500 guilders. From July 1815 to May 1816, Fohr was a student of landscape painting at the Kunstakademie in Munich.
Jerg Ratgeb
Jerg Ratgeb (also Jörg) (born circa 1480 in Schwäbisch Gmend; died 1526 in Pforzheim) was a German painter and contemporary of Derer. Around the turn of the 15th to 16th century, Ratgeb appears to have spent time in Italy, where he came in contact with Italian Renaissance art and with the recently developed use of perspective in painting. After returning to Germany, he settled in Heilbronn. In 1510, he painted the altar of Saint Barbara in the church of nearby Schwaigern. From 1514 to 1517 he was in Frankfurt am Main, where he painted the walls of the refectory and cloister of the Karmeliterkloster (Carmelite Monastery). The paintings, of which only fragments survive, are the largest wall paintings known to the north of the Alps from that period. His most famous work is the Herrenberg Altarpiece, completed in 1521. It was originally painted for the Stiftskirche (abbey church) of Herrenberg. Today, it is on display in the Staatgalerie at Stuttgart. Ratgeb had developed a distinctive personal expressive style, visibly influenced by artists such as Albrecht Derer, Matthias Grenewald and Hieronymus Bosch. Fresco in the Karmeliterkloster, Frankfurt am Main. Copy of the altarpiece in the abbey church at Herrenberg - here depicted when closed Because of his marriage with a serf of the Duke of Werttemberg he lost most of his rights as a citizen of Heilbronn. He moved to Stuttgart, where he became a member of the city council. In that position, he negotiated with the rebelling farmers during the German Peasants' War in 1525. He became part of the military contingent requested by the rebels and was elected councillor and chancellor by the peasants. After the suppression of the rebellion, he was arrested, accused of high treason ("because of the Peasant War and on behalf of Duke Ulrich") and finally executed in Pforzheim in 1526, by being torn apart by four horses.
Erastus Salisbury Field
1805-1900 American painter. He studied with Samuel F. B. Morse in New York during the winter of 1824-5. On his return to the rural isolation of Leverett, MA, he painted his earliest known work, the portrait of his grandmother Elizabeth Billings Ashley (Springfield, MA, Mus. F.A.). His career as an itinerant portrait painter began in 1826, most of his commissions coming through a network of family associations in western Massachusetts and Connecticut. The portraits of 1836-40 are considered his best. From 1841 he lived mainly in New York, where he expanded his subject-matter to include landscapes and American history pictures. There he presumably studied photography, for on his return to Massachusetts he advertised himself as a daguerreotypist. His few portraits painted after 1841 are copied from his own photographs and lack the expressive characterization and decorative power of his earlier work. From 1865 to 1885 his paintings were based primarily on biblical and patriotic themes. The Historical Monument of the American Republic (1867-88; Springfield, MA, Mus. F.A.) stands alone in American folk art in size (2.82*3.89 m), scope and imaginative vision. Inspired by plans for a national celebration of the centennial of the USA in 1876, Field painted an architectural fantasy of eight towers linked by railway bridges and trains at the tops, with the history of the USA in low-relief sculpture on the exterior surfaces of the towers. Field added two more towers to the painting in 1888 and thereafter retired.