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 Morning Walk (mk08) | Mr. and Mr.s Andrews | lady getrude alston | St Mary-s Church | Portrat der Mary Gainsborough, Tochter des Kunstlers |
Related Artists:
Carl Fredrik Hill
Swedish Painter, 1849-1911,Swedish painter and draughtsman. He grew up in the university city of Lund, where his father was a mathematics professor. Despite severe opposition from his father, he studied landscape painting at the Konstakademi in Stockholm (1871-2), under Johan Edvard Bergh and Per Daniel Holm (1835-1903). He also frequently copied Dutch Old Masters, particularly Jacob van Ruisdael. After seeing the work that Alfred Wahlberg had sent home from Paris, Hill began to abandon his initial approach to form and colour, and he left for Paris in November 1873. His most important experience there was his encounter with the painting of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot: 'Corot has discovered a new world, because he has discovered a new way of looking at the old', he wrote in a letter. Other contemporary French painters Hill admired were Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps, Charles-Fran?ois Daubigny, Jean-Franeois Millet and Theodore Rousseau. From Courbet he learnt how to use colour to suggest the surface texture of stone quarries and gravel hills. In Barbizon in 1874 and 1875 Hill met the Hungarian painters Laszlo Pael and Mihaly von Muncacsy. His paintings of this time, for example Autumn Landscape, Evening: Fontainebleau (1875; Malm?, Kstmus.), are characterized by their dark 'luminarism' and their debt to Corot's later works.
Pawel Andrejewitsch Fedotow
painted Junge Witwe in 1851
Edward Bird
(1877- 1968 ) - Watercolours He was an English genre painter who spent most of his working life in Bristol, where the Bristol School of artists formed around him.. He enjoyed a few years of popularity in London, where he challenged the dominance of Sir David Wilkie in the genre painting field, before moving on to history painting, specialising in battle scenes.