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 Carl Friedrich Abel German composer | Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire | miss haverfield, c | Landguard Fort | Self-portrait |
Related Artists:
Paul Maitland
British Painter, 1863-1909
Giacomo Francesco Cipper
(Feldkirch, 1664 - Milan, 1736) was a German painter active in Milan from 1696 to 1736. Of German origin, he was active in Milan in the first half of the 18th century. Fertile painter of scenes of kind of formulation caravaggesca, his first attributed work is dated 1700; he operated in Lombardia and in Veneto ( Hunters and greengrocers , Modena, Gallery Campori; Farmers' family , Venice, Galleries of the academy). Subsequently the artist, perhaps under the influence of the Cerruti (some of whose works were once attributed to Cipper), to the scrupulous surrender of the detail it replaced a less illustrative vision, more sensitive to the games of light. His last known work is Self-portrait (1736, Hampton Court).
Louis Gallait
(9 or 10 May 1810 - 20 November 1887) was a Belgian painter. His d his reputation especially with the large painting of Charles V's abdication. Gallait's works were considered as the basis for a desirable renewal of historical paintings because of the realism, costume faithfulness and colorful posture of his paintings. His last artwork was sent on tour in Germany and that led to new signals even among German historians. He was also a distinguished portrait painter. Gallait died in Brussels in 1887. There is a painting by Louis Gallait at the Norton Art Museum in West Palm Beach, Florida ("Art and Liberty").