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 Alston (mk05) | Detail of Portrait of artist-s Wife | Dr.Isaac Henrique Sequeira | Self-Portrait | Drinkstone Park |
Related Artists:
Egon Schiele
1890-1918 Austrian Egon Schiele Gallery Egon Schiele (12 June 1890 ?C 31 October 1918) was an Austrian painter, a protege of Gustav Klimt, and a major figurative painter of the early 20th century. Schiele's body of work is noted for the intensity and the large number of self-portraits he produced. The twisted body shapes and the expressive line that characterize Schiele's paintings and drawings make the artist an early exponent of Expressionism, although still strongly associated with the art nouveau movement (Jugendstil). The most important collection of Schiele's work is housed in the Leopold Museum, Vienna. In 1907, Schiele sought out Gustav Klimt. Klimt generously mentored younger artists, and he took a particular interest in the gifted young Schiele, buying his drawings, offering to exchange them for some of his own, arranging models for him and introducing him to potential patrons. He also introduced Schiele to the Wiener Werkstätte, the arts and crafts workshop connected with the Secession. In 1908 Schiele had his first exhibition, in Klosterneuburg. Schiele left the Academy in 1909, after completing his third year, and founded the Neukunstgruppe ("New Art Group") with other dissatisfied students. Sitzender weiblicher Akt, 1914Klimt invited Schiele to exhibit some of his work at the 1909 Vienna Kunstschau, where he encountered the work of Edvard Munch, Jan Toorop, and Vincent van Gogh among others. Once free of the constraints of the Academy's conventions, Schiele began to explore not only the human form, but also human sexuality. At the time, many found the explicitness of his works disturbing.
BRUYN, Barthel
German painter (b. 1493, Cologne, d. 1555, Cologne). German Renaissance painter, active in Cologne from 1515. Known especially for his portraits, which combine Northern realism with Italian-inspired monumentality and breadth, Bruyn also painted religious works such as the high altar at Essen Cathedral (1522). A portrait of a man and three religious works are in the Philadelphia Museum; many of his works are in Germany.
Pollaiuolo, Jacopo
Approx. 1441-1496 Painter, brother of Antonio Pollaiuolo. He was described as a painter in the membership records of the Compagnia di S Luca, which he joined in 1472. According to tradition, he initially trained under Andrea del Castagno. In his 1480 tax return Piero reported that he had a small house adjoining the family home '...which I use when I have painting to do'. He produced many paintings for the Florentine workshop,