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 :. | The Artist Daughters, Molly and Peggy | Portrait of a Young Woman | A Coastal Landscape | Portrait of Charles Wolfran Cornwall | Cornard Wood,Near Sudbury,Suffolk |
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Joseph Crawhall
1861-1913 English painter, active in Scotland. He was brought up in Newcastle upon Tyne and was encouraged by his father and by Charles Keene, the cartoonist for Punch, studying at King's College School in London under P. H. Delamotte. There he met E. A. Walton, with whom, joined by James Guthrie, he painted at Roseneath, near Glasgow, in 1879. Crawhall also collaborated with Walton and Guthrie on illustration. His association with the Glasgow Boys was consolidated during the early 1880s on further painting trips in the Trossachs, Berwicks, and Crowland, Lincs. A keen huntsman and rider, Crawhall specialized in bird, animal and humorous subjects, and his work, with that of Arthur Melville, exemplifies the achievement of the Glasgow Boys in watercolour. After studying in Paris in 1882 under Aim? Morot (1850-1913), Crawhall exhibited for the first and only time at the Royal Academy, probably showing A Lincolnshire Meadow (1883; Glasgow, A.G. & Mus.). He then virtually abandoned oil painting and the plein-air technique, working instead from memory and using line and watercolour.
Birch, Thomas
English-born American Painter, 1779-1851 American painter of English birth. He was one of the most important American landscape and marine painters of the early 19th century. He moved to America in 1794 with his father William Birch (1755-1834), a painter and engraver from whom he received his artistic training. The family settled in Philadelphia, where William, armed with letters of introduction from Benjamin West to leading citizens of that city, became a drawing-master. Early in their American careers both Birches executed cityscapes, several of which were engraved. Thomas contributed a number of compositions to The City of Philadelphia in the State of Pennsylvania, North America, as it Appeared in the Year 1800 (1800), a series of views conceived by the elder Birch in obvious imitation of comparable British productions. An English sensibility is also apparent in the many paintings of country estates executed by father and son in the early 19th century These compositions, along with such portrayals of important public edifices in and near Philadelphia as Fairmount Waterworks
Minerva Josephine Chapman
(1858 - 1947) was an American painter. She was known for her work in miniature portraiture, landscape, and still life. She was born in Sand Bank, New York and grew up in Chicago, Illinois. She studied at a number of institutions including Mount Holyoke College (where she graduated from in 1880) and the Art Institute of Chicago. She lived and studied in Paris from the late 1880s to 1915, and again after the first world war, where she established her reputation as an artist. She retired to Palo Alto, California and died at the age of 88.