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 Henry Wise | Woman in Blue | Portrat der Mrs Richard B Sheridan | Portrait of Sarah,Mrs Tobias Rustat | Mrs.Peter william baker |
Related Artists:
Friedrich von Amerling
Austrian Academic Painter, 1803-1887,Austrian painter. He came from a family of craftsmen and studied (1815-24) at the Akademie der bildenden Kenste, Vienna, where one of his teachers was the conservative history painter Hubert Maurer (1738-1818). From 1824 to 1826 he attended the Academy in Prague, where he was taught by Josef Bergler. In 1827 and 1828 Amerling stayed in London, and he met the portrait painter Sir Thomas Lawrence, whose work was to be a strong influence on Amerling's painting during the next two decades. Amerling also travelled to Paris and Rome but was recalled to Vienna on an official commission to paint a life-size portrait of the emperor Francis I of Austria (Vienna, Ksthist. Mus.). With this work,
Simone Peterzano
(c. 1540 - c. 1596) was an Italian painter of the later Mannerism, native of Bergamo. He is mostly known as the master of Caravaggio. He was a pupil of Titian in Venice, Peterzano debuted in Milan with the counterfaçade frescoes in San Maurizio al Monastero Maggiore (1573), influenced by Veronese and Tintoretto. In the same year he painted two canvasses with Histories of Sts. Paul and Barnabas for the church of San Barnaba, also in Milan. Also from the same period are a Piete in the church of San Fedele and a Pentecost for San Paolo Converso (now in Sant'Eufemia). Between 1578 and 1582 Peterzano executed frescoes in the presbytery of Garegnano Charterhouse, considered one of his masterworks. His last works, characterized by a cold monumental style, include a fresco with Stories of St. Anthony of Padua for the church of Sant'Angelo, a canvas with Madonna with Child and Saints for the parish church of Bioggio (Canton Ticino) and an altarpiece with St. Ambrose between Sts. Gervasius and Protasius in the Duomo of Milan (1592, now in the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana).
Francesco Vanni
Italian Baroque Era Painter, 1563-1610 was an Italian painter of the Mannerist style, active in Rome and his native city of Siena. He was half-brother of the painter Ventura Salimbeni, and the stepson of Arcangelo Salimbeni, another Sienese painter. His stepfather died when Francesco was young, and as a 16 year old went first to Bologna, then to Rome. There he apprenticed with Giovanni de' Vecchi during 1579-80, though like other Tuscan painters of his day, he was influenced in part by Federico Barocci from Urbino, and he was among the last painters who also reflected the influence of the Sienese School of painting. He was named a Cavalieri. In Rome, he worked later with Salimbeni, Bartolomeo Passerotti, and Andrea Lilio. He was commissioned by Pope Clement VIII to painted an altarpiece for the St. Peter's, later transferred to mosaic, Simon Magus rebuked by St. Peter. He painted several other pictures for Roman churches; including St. Michael defeats rebel angels for the sacristy of S. Gregorio; a Piet?? for Santa Maria in Vallicella; and the Assumption for S. Lorenzo in Miranda. Returning to Siena, where he ultimately died, he afterwards worked at Parma, Bologna, and again at Rome. At Siena, he painted a S. Raimondo walking on the Sea for the church of the Dominicans. Vanni painted a Baptism of Constantine (1586-7) for the church of San Agostino in Siena. He painted a Christ appearing to St. Catherine for the chapel of il Refugio at the Santuario Cateriniano of Siena, and a Baptism (1587) for the former church of San Giovannino e Gennaro.