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 :. | Gainsborough Mr and Mrs Andrews | Portrait of Henrietta Vernon 10 | Mr. and Mr.s Andrews | Mrs Richard Brinsley Sheridan | Lady and Gentleman in a Landscape |
Related Artists:
Francisco Bayeu
Spanish painter , 1734, Zaragoza, Spain - 1795, Madrid was a Spanish painter, active in a Neoclassic style, whose main subjects were religious and historical themes. Born in Zaragoza, he received a broad childhood education. His initial art studies were with a local master, Jos?? Luz??n[1] and Antonio Gonz??lez Vel??zquez. He then moved to Madrid, winning a scholarship with the painting of the ????Tyranny of Gerion???? to study in the Academia Real de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. The death of his parents and the care of his brothers forced him to return to Zaragoza, until he was recalled by Anton Raphael Mengs to help decorate the Royal Palace of Madrid. In later years, one of his colleagues was Francisco Goya, who married his sister, Josefa Bayeu. He served as court painter to King Charles III of Spain. He was named a professor of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of San Fernando in 1765 and director in 1788. He painted in the Charterhouse of Aula Dei in Zaragoza. In 1767 he was named court painter for Charles III, king of Spain. He was involved in the decoration of various Royal palaces near Madrid.
COPPO DI MARCOVALDO
Italian Byzantine Style Painter, ca.1225-1274
solomon eccles
also known as Solomon Eagle (1618 - 1683) was an English composer. Little if any of his works are extant since, when he became a Quaker, he burned all his books and compositions so as to distance himself from church music. His repugnance for the organised church showed in his name for them: "steeple-houses".