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 :. | Portrat der Mary Gainsborough, Tochter des Kunstlers | Lady Alston (mk05) | The Charterhouse, | The Mall in St.James-s Park | Portrait of John Gainsbourough |
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George French Angas
(1844-1932), was a portrait painter. was an English explorer, naturalist and painter. He was the eldest son of George Fife Angas, prominent in the establishment of the new colony of South Australia. Despite showing remarkable talent in drawing, he was placed in a London business house by his father. He left on a tour of Europe and in 1842 published his first book, "Rambles in Malta and Sicily". As a result of this experience, he turned his back on the world of commerce, and directed his training towards a study of natural history, anatomical drawing and lithography. Embarking on his travels, he was soon to find his acquired skills extremely useful. Angas painted some of the earliest views of South Australia. Arriving in Adelaide in January 1844, he joined Sir George Grey on an expedition into the interior. He soon began an extensive series of journeys to the Murray River lakes, Barossa Valley, Fleurieu Peninsula and the South East, presenting his impressions of the newly established colony ?C its inhabitants, landscape, and its flora and fauna. Following a trip to New Zealand he returned to South Australia in 1845 and travelled to Port Lincoln. In the following year he returned for a short while to England. His next journey in 1846 was to South Africa, where he spent two years in Natal and the Cape, working on a series of drawings and watercolours which were published in 1849 as The Kafirs Illustrated. In this book were views of Cape Town, Durban, Wynberg, Genadendal, Paarl and Somerset West and plates depicting the local ethnic groups such as Hottentots, Malays and Zulus. He married Alicia Mary Moran in 1849, the marriage producing four daughters. In 1853 he was appointed to a position at the Australian Museum in Sydney, eventually becoming Director and staying a total of seven years. He was in Sydney when gold was first discovered near Bathurst, New South Wales. Travelling there to record the gold diggings he executed a number of drawings of the scenes that he found. These were published in Sydney and subsequently in London. Angas returned to South Australia in 1860, and finally went back to England in 1863.
Girolamo Nerli
1860-1926,was an Italian painter who worked and travelled in Australia and New Zealand in the late 19th century influencing Charles Conder and Frances Hodgkins and helping to move Australian and New Zealand art in new directions. His portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery Edinburgh, is usually considered the most searching portrayal of the writer. Born in Siena in Italy to an Italian aristocrat, Ferdinando Pieri Nerli, his full name was Girolamo Pieri Pecci Ballati Nerli. The fourth of six children he was not a 'Marchese' as he was sometimes styled, or a 'Count', but a 'patrizio di Siena', a minor distinction marking the great antiquity of his family. His father married Henrietta Medwin, an Englishwoman. Her father Thomas Medwin was a minor literary figure in Byron's circle, the author of Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron and of The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley; Medwin was a distant relation of Shelley. Girolamo studied art in Florence under Antonio Ciseri and Giovanni Muzzioli and was a younger member of the Italian Macchiaioli school, the 'patch painters', an Italian movement anticipating French Impressionism. He went to Australia in 1885 spending time in Melbourne and Sydney where he was an associate of Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton and an influence on Charles Conder at the time of the Heidelberg School. Nerli's role in that movement has been disputed but his presence and influence are undeniable. was an Italian painter who worked and travelled in Australia and New Zealand in the late 19th century influencing Charles Conder and Frances Hodgkins and helping to move Australian and New Zealand art in new directions. His portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery Edinburgh, is usually considered the most searching portrayal of the writer. Born in Siena in Italy to an Italian aristocrat, Ferdinando Pieri Nerli, his full name was Girolamo Pieri Pecci Ballati Nerli. The fourth of six children he was not a 'Marchese' as he was sometimes styled, or a 'Count', but a 'patrizio di Siena', a minor distinction marking the great antiquity of his family. His father married Henrietta Medwin, an Englishwoman. Her father Thomas Medwin was a minor literary figure in Byron's circle, the author of Journal of the Conversations of Lord Byron and of The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley; Medwin was a distant relation of Shelley. Girolamo studied art in Florence under Antonio Ciseri and Giovanni Muzzioli and was a younger member of the Italian Macchiaioli school, the 'patch painters', an Italian movement anticipating French Impressionism. He went to Australia in 1885 spending time in Melbourne and Sydney where he was an associate of Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton and an influence on Charles Conder at the time of the Heidelberg School. Nerli's role in that movement has been disputed but his presence and influence are undeniable.
Alfred Eduard Chalon
British , (1780-1860)