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 John Vere | Portrait of the Composer Carl Friedrich Abel with his Viola da Gamba | Self-portrait | Landscape with a Peasant on a Path | Mary, Countess Howe |
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John warwick smith
English Painter, 1749-1831 English painter. The son of a gardener to the Gilpin family, he studied under the animal painter Sawrey Gilpin. During a trip to Derbyshire with Gilpin he met George Greville, 2nd Earl of Warwick, who gave him financial support to go to Italy between 1776 and 1781. Smith spent 1778-9 in Naples and was otherwise based in Rome, where he explored the Campagna and made sketches with William Pars and Francis Towne. The strong greens and purples and crisp pen outlines of some of Smith's watercolours are strongly influenced by Towne's style. Smith and Towne travelled together across the Alps on their way back to England in 1781, after which Smith settled in Warwick. He contributed six views to Samuel Middiman's Select Views in Great Britain (1784-5) and between 1784 and 1806 toured Wales 13 times in search of Picturesque and Sublime scenery. He also visited the Lake District between 1789 and 1792, which resulted in the publication of Twenty Views of the Lake District (1791-5); he appears to have been in Devon and Worcestershire as well. Aquatints after Smith were used to illustrate William Sotheby's Tour through Parts of Wales (1794),
AVERCAMP, Hendrick
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1585-1634 1634). He was the first artist in the northern Netherlands to paint winter landscapes. Before him only a few Flemish artists, among them Pieter Bruegel I and his sons, and Jacob Grimmer, had made winter scenery the main subject of their work. Avercamp created a new genre of Dutch painting by combining the panoramic scope, bright colours and high vantage point of these Flemish models with an emphasis on anecdotal detail.
Antonio Maria Fabres y Costa
Spanish, 1854 - 1936 Antonio Fabres was a famous Spanish artist during the turn of the century. He was born in Barcelona Spain in 1854. It is said that he was the artist gene since his father was a draughtsman and his uncle a silversmith. He started studying at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in his native city at the age of 13. When he turned 21, he received a grant to study in Rome. There are records of his sculptures from early in his career but later on he became a painter almost exclusively. He joined Mariano Fortuny with a group that became known for their intense realism. Their popularity grew with the taste of the bourgeoisie seeking exotic images with oriental of medieval themes. He went back to Barcelona in 1886 and in 1894 he moved to Paris. The popularity he had earned during his decade in Italy helped him open a large studio where he could create complex scenes for the upper classes. In 1902 the Academia de San Carlos decided to renovate their classical techniques with the ones of realism that were so popular in Europe at the time. Antonio Fabres was called to take the place of Santiago Rebull as head of this important institution. Although some of his students went on to become what was later known as the Post-Revolutionary Movement in Mexican art, the faculty had a hard time adapting to his distinct style and personality. In 1907, he returned to Rome. One of his last commissions in Mexico was the decorations of a hall at the Porfirio Diaz mansion where he mainly focused on art nouveau style . Fabres was recognized most everywhere he traveled. He was acclaimed in Barcelona, London, Paris, Vienna and Lyon. At the end of his life he was dealt a very unfortunate blow when in 1926 he decided to donate a large amount of works to the Museo de Bellas Artes de Barcelona. In exchange for this generous donation he asked the Museum that a hall be built with his name, but the museum never built that hall and although he protested several times, they could never settle the argument. Antonio Fabres died in Rome in 1938.