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 :. | Lady Sheffield | Ox Cart by the Bands of a Navigable River | Dorfmadchen mit Hund und Henkelkrug | Mr and Mrs Andrews | Portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire |
Related Artists:
Bonaventura Peeters
(Antwerp, 23 July 1614 - Hoboken (Antwerp), 25 July 1652) was a Flemish Baroque painter who specialized in seascapes and shipwrecks, known as Zeekens (small seascapes). Peeters, brother of the seascape painters Jan Peeters I, Gillis Peeters, and Catharina Peeters, learned to paint from his father, who became a master in Antwerp's guild of St. Luke in 1607 - 1608, and his earlier works are related to the tonal phase of Dutch landscape painting. Later paintings, however, reflect the stronger colors of Italianate classicism. This shift follows the general changes in artistic style at the time. Like his brother Jan, dramatic shipwrecks with dark billowy clouds, form a significant part of his oeuvre, as do serene ports and "portraits" of ships.Also, while many of Peeters's paintings reflect actual locations, and he may have even travelled along the coast of Scandinavia, his many views of far-away Mediterranean and Middle Eastern ports reflect a growing taste for the exotic and are probably inspired from fantasy and from prints. This tradition developed simultaneously in Flemish painting and in Dutch Golden Age painting, with many artists, including Peeters, working in both Antwerp and in the Dutch Republic.
Carel Fabritus
1622-1654 Dutch Carel Fabritus Locations Painter. His oeuvre consists of a scant dozen paintings, since research has rigorously discounted many previously attributed works. These few paintings, however, document the painter unique development within his brief 12-year career. He is often mentioned as being the link between Rembrandt and the Delft school, particularly Pieter de Hooch and Jan Vermeer, whose depiction of light owes much to Fabritius late works in which his use of cool silvery colours to define forms in space marks a radical departure from Rembrandt use of chiaroscuro.
Jean Delville
Belgian Symbolist Painter, 1867-1953 Belgian painter, decorative artist and writer. He studied at the Academie Royale des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, with Jean-Franeois Portaels and the Belgian painter Joseph Stallaert (1825-1903). Among his fellow students were Eugene Laermans, Victor Rousseau and Victor Horta. From 1887 he exhibited at L Essor, where in 1888 Mother (untraced), which depicts a woman writhing in labour, caused a scandal. Although his drawings of the metallurgists working in the Cockerill factories near Charleroi were naturalistic, from 1887 he veered towards Symbolism: the drawing of Tristan and Isolde (1887; Brussels, Musees Royaux B.-A.), in its lyrical fusion of the two bodies, reveals the influence of Richard Wagner. Circle of the Passions (1889), inspired by Dante Alighieri Divina commedia, was burnt c. 1914; only drawings remain (Brussels, Musees Royaux B.-A.). Jef Lambeaux copied it for his relief Human Passions (1890-1900; Brussels, Parc Cinquantenaire). Delville became associated with Josephin Peladan, went to live in Paris and exhibited at the Salons de la Rose+Croix, created there by Peladan (1892-5). A devoted disciple of Peladan, he had his tragedies performed in Brussels and in 1895 painted his portrait (untraced). He exhibited Dead Orpheus (1893; Brussels, Gillion-Crowet priv. col.), an idealized head, floating on his lyre towards reincarnation, and Angel of Splendour (1894; Brussels, Gillion-Crowet priv. col.), a painting of great subtlety.