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 :. | A Coastal Landscape | The Artist Daughters, Molly and Peggy | Peter Darnell Muilman Charles Crokatt and William Keable in a Landscape | Mrs.Siddons | The Honourable |
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Hans Jorgen Hammer
(29 December 1815, Copenhagen - 28 Januar 1882, Rome) was a Danish artist who specialized in genre painting. Following an apprenticeship with J.G. Berg in Copenhagen, Hammer was admitted to the Danish Academy in 1828. In 1841, he became a student of Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg who remained a close friend. He was awarded the Academy's little silver medal in 1842 and the large silver medal the following year. Det sidste Læs, his entry for the Neuhausen Prize in 1845, was bought by Statens Museum for Kunst but it was not until 1837 that he was awarded the prize with Bønder forsamlede til Lystig­hed en Søndag Eftermiddag under aaben Himmel. Hammer was an industrious but rather serious and thoughtful artist. His avid approach to detail slowed down his work considerably. After the outbreak of war in 1848, he became a naval officer. With a stipendium from the Academy, he travelled to Italy in 1857 where he painted Torvet i Ariccia efter Solnedgang, considerably enhancing his reputation in Denmark. The painting was acquired by Statens Museum for Kunst in 1863. Other notable works are Axsamlersken (1866) and Postbudet med det længe ventede Brev (1877). After recovering from a serious illness, he travelled to Rome in 1881 but died there the following year
Luke Clennell
Born, 1781, Back. Died, 1840, Country, England was an English engraver and painter. Born in Morpeth, Northumberland, the son of a farmer, he was apprenticed to the engraver Thomas Bewick in 1797. Between 1799 and 1803 he acted as Bewick's principal assistant on the second volume of the History of British Birds. After completing his seven-year apprenticeship with Bewick he moved to London, where he married a daughter of the copper-engraver Charles Turner Warren (1762-1823). Through his marriage he became acquainted with such book illustrators as William Finden and Abraham Raimbach. He gained a reputation as an engraver and in May 1806 he was awarded the gold palette of the Society of Arts for a wood-engraving of a battle scene. He subsequently gave up engraving for painting. In 1814 he received from the Earl of Bridgewater a commission for a large picture to commemorate the banquet given to the Allied Sovereigns at the Guildhall, London. He experienced great difficulty in getting the distinguished guests to sit for their portraits, and suffered a mental breakdown. After a spell in an asylum, he recovered and returned home.
Ehilu Vedder
1836-1923 Ehilu Vedder Gallery