1727-1788 British Thomas Gainsborough Locations English painter, draughtsman and printmaker. He was the contemporary and rival of Joshua Reynolds, who honoured him on 10 December 1788 with a valedictory Discourse (pubd London, 1789), in which he stated: If ever this nation should produce genius sufficient to acquire to us the honourable distinction of an English School, the name of Gainsborough will be transmitted to posterity, in the history of Art, among the very first of that rising name. He went on to consider Gainsborough portraits, landscapes and fancy pictures within the Old Master tradition, against which, in his view, modern painting had always to match itself. Reynolds was acknowledging a general opinion that Gainsborough was one of the most significant painters of their generation. Less ambitious than Reynolds in his portraits, he nevertheless painted with elegance and virtuosity. He founded his landscape manner largely on the study of northern European artists and developed a very beautiful and often poignant imagery of the British countryside. By the mid-1760s he was making formal allusions to a wide range of previous art, from Rubens and Watteau to, eventually, Claude and Titian. He was as various in his drawings and was among the first to take up the new printmaking techniques of aquatint and soft-ground etching. Because his friend, the musician and painter William Jackson (1730-1803), claimed that Gainsborough detested reading, there has been a tendency to deny him any literacy. He was, nevertheless, as his surviving letters show, verbally adept, extremely witty and highly cultured. He loved music and performed well. He was a person of rapidly changing moods, humorous, brilliant and witty. At the time of his death he was expanding the range of his art, having lived through one of the more complex and creative phases in the history of British painting. He painted with unmatched skill and bravura; while giving the impression of a kind of holy innocence, he was among the most artistically learned and sophisticated painters of his generation. It has been usual to consider his career in terms of the rivalry with Reynolds that was acknowledged by their contemporaries; while Reynolds maintained an intellectual and academic ideal of art, Gainsborough grounded his imagery on contemporary life, maintaining an aesthetic outlook previously given its most powerful expression by William Hogarth. His portraits, landscapes and subject pictures are only now coming to be studied in all their complexity; having previously been viewed as being isolated from the social, philosophical and ideological currents of their time, they have yet to be fully related to them. It is clear, however, that his landscapes and rural pieces, and some of his portraits, were as significant as Reynolds acknowledged them to be in 1788.  Related Paintings of Thomas Gainsborough :. | Portrait of John Gainsbourough | Portrait of Charles Wolfran Cornwall | Portrait of Ann Ford | Self portrait | Portrait of the Queen Charlotte |
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Ippolito Caffi
Italian Painter, 1809-1866
Mehoffer, Jozef
Polish, 1869-1946 was a Polish painter and decorative artist, one of the leading artists of the Young Poland movement and one of the most revered Polish artists of his time. Mehoffer studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Krakew under Władysław Łuszczkiewicz, and later at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna as well as in Paris at the Academie Colarossi among others. There Mehoffer began painting portraits often of people of historical significance. He later expanded his work to include different techniques, such as graphic art, stained glass, textiles, chalk drawings, etchings and book illustrations. He produced set designs for theatre and stylized furniture designs. Mehoffer received international acclaim for his stained glass windows in the Gothic St Nicholas Collegiate Church in Fribourg, Switzerland produced in 1895-1936. His other stained glass designs include the Radziwill Chapel in Balice (1892), Grauer Chapel in Opava (1901), church in Jutrosini (1902), Holy Cross Chapel at Wawel (1904), sepulchral chapel in Goluchoew (1906), Orgelmeister Chapel in Vienna (1910), cathedral in Wloclawek (1935-40), cathedral in Przemysl (1940) and church in Debniki near Krakow (1943).There are stained glass designed by Mehoffer in Jesus Holliest Heart in Turek (East Greater Poland - central Poland) in the same church there are also mural paintings made by Mehoffer. Mehoffer explored various media further throughout his career to include a range of applied arts in his projects. He manufactured a multiplicity of book covers, ornaments and posters.
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo
Italian Rococo Era Painter, 1696-1770 Giovanni Battista Tiepolo was born in Venice on March 5, 1696. His father, who was part owner of a ship, died when Tiepolo was scarcely a year old, but the family was left in comfortable circumstances. As a youth, he was apprenticed to Gregorio Lazzarini, a mediocre but fashionable painter known for his elaborately theatrical, rather grandiose compositions. Tiepolo soon evolved a more spirited style of his own. By the time he was 20, he had exhibited his work independently, and won plaudits, at an exhibition held at the church of S. Rocco. The next year he became a member of the Fraglia, or painters guild. In 1719 he married Cecilia Guardi, whose brother Francesco was to become famous as a painter of the Venetian scene. They had nine children, among them Giovanni Domenico and Lorenzo Baldassare, who were also painters. In the 1720s Tiepolo carried out many large-scale commissions on the northern Italian mainland. Of these the most important is the cycle of Old Testament scenes done for the patriarch of Aquileia, Daniele Dolfin, in the new Archbishop Palace at Udine. Here Tiepolo abandoned the dark hues that had characterized his early style and turned instead to the bright, sparkling colors that were to make him famous.