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 :. | The Harvest Wagon | Mrs.Siddons | Portrat der Mary Gainsborough, Tochter des Kunstlers | Woman in Blue | Bumper,a Bull Terrier |
Related Artists:
William Glackens
1870-1938 William Glackens Galleries William James Glackens (March 13, 1870?CMay 22, 1938) was a U.S. realist painter. Glackens studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and later moved to New York City, where he co-founded what came to be called the Ashcan School art movement. This group of artists, dubbed by the press "the Eight Independent Painters" or The Eight, chose to exhibit their works without pre-approval by the juries of the existing art establishment. He became known for his dark-hued paintings of street scenes and daily life in the city's neighborhoods. His later work was brighter in tone, and showed the influence of Renoir. During much of his career as a painter, Glackens also worked as an illustrator for newspapers and magazines in Philadelphia and New York City.
KUPECKY, Jan
Bohemian Baroque Era Painter, 1667-1740 Bohemian painter. He was born into a weaver's family, who, as Moravian Brethren, were forced to emigrate from Bohemia to Pezinok, Slovakia. Having met the artist Benedikt Claus (1632/3-1707), he left home at 15 to join him in Vienna, and three years later accompanied him to Italy. He worked in Venice and other north Italian towns before settling in Rome, where he made a meagre living by copying portraits. Although he attempted genre and historical paintings, portraiture became his main work. His influences ranged from prominent Venetian painters such as Bernardo Strozzi, Johann Carl Loth and Giuseppe Ghislandi to Anthony van Dyck and Hyacinthe Rigaud.
Gerrit Dou
1613-1675 Dutch Gerard Dou Locations Dutch genre and portrait painter of Leiden. The son of a glass painter, he was apprenticed to an engraver and worked from 1628 to 1631 in the studio of the young Rembrandt. Although he occasionally borrowed Rembrandt themes, he was more detailed and meticulous in his execution. His scenes of domestic, middle-class life were tremendously popular and often imitated. Among his most famous works are Evening Light (Rijks Mus.), Young Man (The Hague), The Cook (Louvre), and a self-portrait (Metropolitan Mus.).