English Rococo Era/Romantic Painter, 1727-1788 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's 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.   Related Paintings of GAINSBOROUGH, Thomas :. | Mrs Grace Dalrymple Elliot xdg | Mrs Sarah Siddons dfg | The Marsham Children rdfg | Six studies of a cat | River Landscape dg |
Related Artists:
Lambertini, Michele di Matteo
Italian Painter, active 1416-1469
Marianne Stokes
(1855 Graz, Styria - August 1927 London), born Marianne Preindlsberger in the Austrian province of Styria, was an Austrian painter. She settled in England after her marriage to Adrian Scott Stokes (1854-1935), the landscape painter, whom she had met in Pont-Aven. Marianne Stokes was considered one of the leading artists in Victorian England. Preindlsberger first studied in Munich under Lindenschmidt and having been awarded a scholarship for her first picture, 'Muttergluck', she worked in France under Pascal Adolphe Jean Dagnan-Bouveret (1852-1929), Colin and Gustave Courtois (1853-1923). She painted in the countryside and Paris, and, as with many other young painters, fell under the spell of the rustic naturalist Jules Bastien-Lepage. Her style continued to show his influence even when her subject matter changed from rustic to medieval romantic and biblical. While in France she met the Finnish painter Helene Schjerfbeck, in whose company she visited Pont-Aven in 1883. Her first salon painting, 'Reflection', which had been painted in Brittany, was exhibited in 1885 at the Royal Academy. Her work was also shown at the Grosvenor Gallery, New Gallery, and the Society of British Artists and in 1885, a year after her marriage, she took to using the name 'Mrs. Adrian Stokes'. She held a joint exhibition with her husband at the Fine Art Society in 1900. The Stokes' lived in St Ives where Marianne was a member of the Newlyn School. Having no children, they regularly travelled abroad, frequently to the Tyrol, and in 1905 to Slovakia and the High Tatra. Here they spent about half a year sketching and painting in the villages of Važec, Mengusovce and Ždiar. Adrian Stokes concentrated on landscapes with images of hay-harvesting and picturesque cottages, while Marianne Stokes painted portraits showing fine detail of the garments. These paintings provide a valuable record of the Slovak culture. After abandoning oils, and inspired by the Pre-Raphaelite movement, she painted flat compositions in tempera and gesso, her paintings giving the impression of being frescoes on plaster surfaces. She was an Associate of the Royal Society of Painters in Water Colours.
William James Hubard
British/American Artist , Silhouettist , Sculptor, and Scientist , 1807-1862