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 Edward Ligonier, 1st Earl Ligonier | The Lady-s Last Stake | Portrat der Mary Gainsborough, Tochter des Kunstlers | Drinkstone Park | Children Building Houses with Cards |
Related Artists:
Marcin Zaleski
was a Polish painter. Zaleski was born in Krakew. Among his works was a series of paintings on the November Uprising in Warsaw, to which he was an eyewitness as well as numerous other paintings of the city. His work is featured in Turkey's Adam Mickiewicz Museum and the Gomel Palace, among other locations. He died in Warsaw.
Julius Kronberg
1850-1921,Swedish painter and illustrator. He was educated at the Konstakademi in Stockholm, where his teachers were J. C. Boklund (1817-80), August Malmstr?m and Johan Fredrik H?ckert. In 1873 he travelled on a scholarship to D?sseldorf, and in the following year he went to Munich. There he was strongly influenced by the Old Masters (especially Rubens), as well as Hans Makart robustly theatrical style. Together they shaped Kronberg early works, for example Hunting Nymph and Fauns (1875; Stockholm, Nmus.), which caused a sensation when it was exhibited in Stockholm in 1876 and established his reputation. Kronberg left Munich in 1877 and settled in Rome, where, between trips to Egypt and Tunisia, he stayed until 1889, when he returned to Stockholm. During his years in Rome his style became increasingly austere. His exuberant Munich manner was replaced by a colder illusionism, which emphasized the historical details of subjects taken from the Bible and Shakespeare. Typical is David and Saul (1885; Stockholm, Nmus.), which reflected his study of Lawrence Alma-Tadema.
Fernand Hodler
Day I,1899-1900