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 Ann Ford | Portrait of the Queen Charlotte | Portrait of Lady Margaret Georgiana Poyntz later Margaret Georgiana Spencer, Countess Spencer | Landscape with a Woodcutter cowrting a Milkmaid | Portrait of Grace Elliott |
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Peter Parler
German Gothic Era Sculptor, 1330-1399,was a German architect, best-known for building Saint Vitus Cathedral and Charles Bridge in Prague, where he lived from about 1356. His father, master builder Heinrich Parler (the name deriving from "parlerius", speaker and head of the masons), had moved to Schwäbisch Gm??nd from Cologne, to lead the reconstruction works of the Holy Cross parish church. Members of the large Parler family worked in construction works around all of Europe. Peter Parler became the master mason of Saint Vitus Cathedral in 1352, after the death of its original architect, Matthias of Arras. Apart from the cathedral, he was the main designer of the New Town of Prague and built Charles Bridge and its towers. In the Royal Palace of Prague Castle, Parler built the All Saints' Chapel. After the fire of 1541 it was redecorated in the Baroque style. He was apparently the architect of the Church of Our Lady (Frauenkirche) built in the market square of Nuremberg, to replace the synagogue torn down in the pogrom of 1349 following the plague. Between 1360-78 Parler built the chancel of the St. Bartholomew church in Kolin. He died in Prague in 1399, and was buried in the St. Vitus cathedral. His work was continued by his sons Wenzel and Johann.
Hendrick van Anthonissen
(29 May 1605, Amsterdam - 12 November 1656, Amsterdam) was a Dutch marine painter. Van Anthonissen was the son of Aert Anthonisz (a.k.a. Aart van Antum) and painted in the style of his brother-in-law and teacher Jan Porcellis and of Jan van Goyen. He is the author of sea paintings in the Hermitage, St. Petersburg and the Prague Gallery, which through their signatures have been ascribed to a mythical Hendrik van Antem. In the 1630's he lived in The Hague, Leiden, and Leiderdorp, but from 1642 he was back in Amsterdam. He is known for beach scenes and seascapes in the manner of Jan Porcellis, sometimes in grisaille. He was the father of the marine painter Arnoldus van Anthonissen.
Pietro Faccini
(1562 - 1602 or 1614), was an Italian painter, active near his birthplace of Bologna in styles bridging Mannerism and the nascent Baroque. According to Malvasia, the main biographer of the early Bolognese Baroque, he apprenticed in his twenties with the with Ludovico and Annibale Carracci. His style departs from the linear "Roman" quality assumed by his mentor, and has a more sparkling quality, influenced by Tintoretto, Correggio, and Bassano. His documented painterly output consists of about a dozen works. In 1590, he painted the Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, now found in the church of San Giovanni in Monte (Bologna). He completed altarpieces for San Domenico and Santa Maria dei Servi in 1593-1594 and a Presepio in the Pinacoteca of Bologna.