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 :. | Portrait of Uvedale Tomkins Price | Mr.and Mrs.William Hallett | john campbell ,4th duke of argyll | Woman in Blue | The Mall in St.James-s Park |
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James Abbot McNeill Whistler
b Lowell MA 1834 d London 1903
j. f. willumsen
(7. september 1863 i København - 4. april 1958 i Cannes) var en af pionererne bag det moderne gennembrud i dansk billedkunst omkring 1900. Han var primært maler, men mestrede de fleste kunstarter og arbejdede desuden som billedhugger, grafiker, keramiker, arkitekt og fotograf. J.F. Willumsen studerede ved Det Kongelige Danske Kunstakademi fra 1881 til 1885. Efter tre forgæves forsøg på at blive indstillet til afgangsprøven på Kunstakademiet, studerede han på Kunstnernes Frie Studieskoler i København. I 1891 var han med til at stifte Den Frie Udstilling, hvis udstillingsbygning han tegnede i 1898. Willumsen opholdt sig i hovedparten af sit liv uden for Danmarks grænser, hovedsageligt i Frankrig, hvor han under et ophold i Paris 1890-94 blev præget af symbolismen. I de følgende årtier blev han eksponent for flere af epokens kunstretninger og hans stil ændredes i mere ekspressiv retning. Willumsen tilbød en stor del af sine værker og kunstsamling til staten og arbejdede fra 1930'erne på oprettelse af et museum. I 1957, året før hans død, åbnede J.F. Willumsens museum i Frederikssund.
Maurycy Gottlieb
Drohobytsch, February 21/28, 1856 - Krakew, July 17, 1879) was a Jewish painter, of Polish-speaking Galician Jews from the western part of Ukraine. He was born in Drohobych (at that time Austria-Hungary), Galicia, modern Lviv region, western Ukraine. Maurycy was one of Isaac and Fanya Tigerman Gottlieb's eleven children. At fifteen, he was enrolled at the Vienna Fine Arts Academy. Later, he would study under Jan Matejko in Krakew. However, he experienced anti-semitism from his fellow students, and left Matejko's studio after less than a year, he then traveled to Norway settling in Molde. After several years he returned to Vienna to pursue his Jewish roots. At twenty, he won a gold medal from a Munich art competition for Shylock and Jessica (at right), showing a scene from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. He based Jessica's face on that of Laura Rosenfeld, to whom he had proposed marriage. However, Rosenfeld rejected his proposal, and wed a Berlin banker. Gottlieb then planned to marry Lola Rosengarten, but when he heard about Rosenfeld's marriage he committed suicide by exposure to the elements, dying of complications from a cold. Despite his early death, more than three hundred of his works survive, though not all are finished. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, many Polish collections unknown in the West were discovered, and his reputation grew greatly. His brother, painter Leopold Gottlieb, was born five years after his death.