Thomas Gainsborough
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 :. | Mr and Mrs William Hallett | Self-Portrait | Princess Elizabeth of the United Kingdom | Dr.Isaac Henrique Sequeira | Portrait of the Queen Charlotte | Related Artists: Juan Bautista de Espinosa(1590-1641, Madrid) was a Spanish still life painter.
More paintings remain of him than biographical data and there is only one known painting remaining.
It is only known that he worked in Toledo and Madrid from 1612 to 1626 and, judging by his style, he was trained in Holland. De Espinosa's style is judged to be the transition from Flemish Baroque to Spanish Baroque.
Several mural paintings in Spanish churches are also attributed to him; one of these is in Alcaudete.
Abraham GovaertsAbraham Govaerts (Antwerp, 1589 - 9 September 1626) was a Flemish Baroque painter who specialized in small cabinet-sized forest landscapes in the manner of Jan Brueghel the Elder and Gillis van Coninxloo.[1] He became a master in Antwerp's guild of St. Luke in 1607-1608, and subsequently trained several other painters in including Alexander Keirincx. Govaerts' paintings, such as A Forest View with the Sacrifice of Isaac (Alte Pinakothek, Munich), typically show diminutive history, mythological or biblical subjects within a Mannerist three-color universal landscape bracketed by repoussoir trees. The figures were often added by other artists, especially by members of the Francken family. Donat, Johann Danielpainted Emperor Leopold II in the regalia of the in 1806
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