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 :. | Isabella,Viscountess Molyneux | Rest on the Way | Landscape with a Woodcutter cowrting a Milkmaid | Detail of Conversation in a Park | St Mary-s Church |
Related Artists:
Leo Gestel
Leo Gestel (11 November 1881, Woerden- 26 November 1941, Hilversum) was a Dutch painter. His father Willem Gestel was also an artist. Leo Gestel experimented with cubism, expressionism, futurism and postimpressionism. Along with Piet Mondrian he was among the leading artists of Dutch modernism.
SIRANI, Elisabetta
Italian Baroque Era Painter, 1638-1665 Italian painter. She was the daughter of Giovanni Andrea Sirani (1610-70), who had been Guido Reni's principal assistant. Encouraged by Carlo Malvasia, her mentor and eventual biographer, she was painting professionally by the age of 17. Her prolific talent, as well as her reputed beauty and modesty, soon brought her European renown. The details of her training are unclear, but as a woman she would not have had access to an academy and (like many other professional women painters prior to the 20th century) she was probably taught by her father. Her sisters Anna Maria (1645-1715) and Barbara (alive in 1678) were also practising artists and Elisabetta herself is known to have had female students. As women, they could not undertake any formal study of the male nude, and Sirani's weakness in depicting male anatomy is sometimes clearly detectable in her work Sirani's drawings employ a highly individual pen-and-wash method, eschewing outline and employing quick, blunt strokes of barely dilute ink to create striking chiaroscuro effects
Andreas Schelfhout
(February 16, 1787, The Hague - April 19, 1870, The Hague) was a Dutch painter, etcher and lithographer, known for his landscape paintings. He belongs to the Romantic movement. His Dutch winter scenes and frozen canals with skaters were already famous during his lifetime. He became one of the most influential Dutch landscape artists of his century. He started as a house painter in the framing business of his father. He already started painting pictures in his spare time. After a well-received first exhibition in The Hague, his father sent him to receive proper training to Joannes Breckenheimer (1772-1856), a stage designer, in The Hague. He learned not only the technical aspects of painting, but also made detailed studies of the 17th-century Dutch landscape artists Meindert Hobbema en Jacob van Ruisdael. In 1815 he started his own workshop. Through his technical excellence and sense of composition and his use of naturalistic colours, he soon became famous also outside The Hague. In 1819 he was awarded the Gold Medal at the exhibition in Antwerp. In 1818 he became a member of the Royal Academy for Visual Arts of Amsterdam. He reputation continued to grow and in1822 he was given the rank of Fourth Class Correspondent of the Royal Dutch Institute. From then on, one exhibition followed after another. Initially he painted mainly summer scenes, beach scenes, and animal paintings. But as his initial winter scenes even had more success, he began to include them in his exhibitions. He was mainly a studio artist, relying on his sketches done en plein air. His sketchbook Liber Veritatis (Book of Truth) shows that he made about twenty paintings a year, among them a few foreign views. This indicated that he travelled abroad around 1825. In later years he visited France in 1833, England in 1835 (especially to study the works of Constable) and Germany. He provided training to several painters who would become famous in their own right : Johan Hendrik Weissenbruch, Johan Jongkind (one of the forerunners of the Impressionists), Charles Leickert, Jan Willem van Borselen, Nicholas Roosenboom, Willem Troost, the American Hudson River School Painter Louis Remy Mignot and his son-in-law Wijnand Nuyen. At the end of his career he put together a series of eighty landscape drawings, mainly recordings of previous paintings and watercolours. They were drawn in chalk and lightly coloured. His death marked the end of the Romantic period in Holland. He is considered a precursor of the Hague School