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 :. | Woman in Blue | Isabella,Viscountess Molyneux | Der Morgenspaziergang | Portrait of Elizabeth and Charles Bedford | mr.and mrs.andrews |
Related Artists:
Matthias Grunewald
German Northern Renaissance Painter, ca.1470-1528,was an important German Renaissance painter of religious works, who ignored Renaissance classicism to continue the expressive and intense style of late medieval Central European art into the 16th century. Only ten paintings (several consisting of many panels) and thirty-five drawings survive, all religious, although many others were lost at sea in the Baltic on their way to Sweden as war booty. His reputation was obscured until the late nineteenth century, and many of his paintings were attributed to Albrecht D??rer, who is now seen as his stylistic antithesis. His largest and most famous work is the Isenheim Altarpiece in Colmar, Alsace (now in France). The details of his life are unusually unclear for a painter of his significance at this date, despite the fact that his commissions show that he had reasonable recognition in his own lifetime. His real name remains uncertain, but was definitely not Grunewald; this was a mistake by the 17th-century writer, Joachim von Sandrart, who confused him with another artist. He is documented as "Master Mathis" or "Mathis the Painter" (Mathis der Maler), and as using as surname both Gothart and Neithardt - this last may have been his surname, or more likely that of his wife. He was probably born in Wurzburg in the 1470s. It is possible he was a pupil of Hans Holbein the Elder. From about 1500 he seems to have lived at Seligenstadt, when not working elsewhere. His first dated painting is probably in Munich, dated 1503 on a much later note which apparently records an older inscription. From about 1510 to 1525 he served in the Rhineland as court painter,
Joris van Son
1623-1667) was a highly popular Flemish Baroque painter of fruit and flowers, in banquet style on a plank, but also in garland form. He seems to have been influenced by Jan Davidszoon de Heem, since his subjects follow his style quite closely. According to Houbraken his paintings were prized for preserving summer plenty in the middle of winter. In a poem by Cornelis de Bie, it is written that his fruits would tempt a pregnant woman. His paintings hang in many european museums, and the Dutch RKD has over 70 known works by him on record. He signed his works JORIS VAN SON. His students were Frans van Everbroeck, Jan Pauwel Gillemans II, and Norbert Montalie.
Diepraam, Abraham
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, ca.1622-1670