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 :. | Pfeiferauchender Bauer vor der Huttentxr | Mr and Mrs Andrews | Portrait of William Wollaston | Gainsborough Daughter Mary | Lavenham Church from the South |
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Alessandro Bonvicino
(c. 1498 - December 22, 1554), more commonly known as Il Moretto da Brescia, was an Italian Renaissance painter of Brescia and Venice. He was born at Rovato, in Brescian territory, and studied first under Fioravante Ferramola. Others state he trained with Vincenzo Foppa. His brothers Pietro and Jacopo were also painters. The 1911 Britannica claims he apprenticed with Titian in Venice and that Moretto modelled his earlier portrait-painting style on the Venetian style. On the other hand, the style also resembles that of Giorgione or late Bellini. The 1911 Britannica also states that he conceived a great enthusiasm for Raphael, though he never traveled to Rome; on the other hand, his classical serenity resembles that shown by Leonardo and his followers in Lombardy such as, for example, Bramantino. He may have consulted with his contemporary Girolamo Savoldo. Moretto excelled more in sedate altarpieces than in narrative action, and more in oil-painting than in fresco, although he painted fine frescoes depicting the lollygagging daughters of Count Martinengo in one of the palaces near Brescia. In 1521, he worked with Girolamo Romanino in the Cappella del Sacramento in the old cathedral of Brescia, where Moretto completed a Last Supper, Elijah in the Desert, and a Fall of Manna.He was active during 1522-24 in Padua. He painted alongside with Lorenzo Lotto at Santa Maria Maggiore in Brescia. Also in Brescia, he completed a Five Virgin Martyrs and his masterpiece, the Assumption of the Madonna for the church of San Clemente; a Coronation of the Madonna with four saints (c. 1525) for the church of Santi Nazaro e Celso; a St. Joseph for Santa Maria della Grazie; and a St Nicholas of Ban for Santa Maria de Miracoli. He collaborated with Floriano Ferramola in the decoration of the dome of the cathedral in Brescia.
Vasily Tropinin
1776-1857 Russian painter. He was born a serf and in 1790 was apprenticed to a pastrycook in St Petersburg. From 1793 he attended classes at the Academy of Art there, in 1799 becoming a pupil of the portrait painter Stepan Shchukin (1762-1828). In 1804 he was sent to work as a pastrycook and manservant on an estate in the Ukraine owned by his master, General Morkov. Tropinin's Ukrainian period (1804-21) was interrupted by frequent, often protracted, visits to Moscow. During these years he copied a great deal, drew landscapes from nature and also painted religious subjects. His early style is painterly and distinguished by freedom of execution and skill in the use of colour, but the compositions are derivative and the drawing weak: The Spinner (1820s), The Lacemaker (1823), Wedding in the Village of Kukavka, Podolsky Province and Girl with a Bird (all Moscow, Tret'yakov Gal.). Portraiture, however, began to take on a more important place in his work; the best of this period is the Portrait of Arseny, the Artist's Son (1818; Moscow, Tret'yakov Gal.), especially notable for its use of colour. Tropinin captured perfectly the child's spontaneous vision of the world, his sensitive spirit and openness. While in Moscow from 1813 to 1818, he portrayed a series of important cultural figures that brought him great popularity. He was freed from serfdom on 8 May 1823 and shortly thereafter he became a nominee to the Academy for his paintings The Lacemaker
Filip Andreevich Malyavin
Russian, 1869-1940