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 a Girl and Boy | Detail of Landscape with a Peasant on a path | Thomas Graham | Mr and Mrs Andrews (nn03) | Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire |
Related Artists:
William George Richardson
artist (b at Nottingham, Eng 12 June 1833; d at Sussex, NB 18 Nov 1889)
Ali of Golconda
the period of 1465-1535
Arturo Michelena
16 June 1863 - 29 July 1898) was a Venezuelan painter born in Valencia, Carabobo State. He began to paint at a young age under his father's tutelage. Traveled to Paris where he studied in the famous Academie Julian. He was the first Venezuelan artist to succeed overseas and, with Cristebal Rojas (1857-1890) and Marten Tovar y Tovar (1827-1902), one of the most important Venezuelan painters of the 19th century. His first great success occurred in Paris at Le Salon des Artistes Français in 1887. Encouraged by his teacher Jean-Paul Laurens (1838-1921), Michelena presented a canvas titled L'Enfant Malade (The sick boy) which was awarded the Gold Medal, second class, the highest honor a foreign artist could receive at the salon. The painting was quickly considered a masterpiece and was acquired by the Astors in New York in the late 19th century. Later the painting traveled to South Florida when it was acquired by Owens Burns, a business partner of John Ringling, the circus magnate. After Burns' death the painting was stored in the Ringling Museum's vaults where it remained away from public view for more than 60 years. In 2004 Sotheby's rescued the canvas and arranged for it to be included in an auction of Latin American art.