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 :. | Tochter des Kunstlers | River Landscape dg | Portrat des Heneage Lloyd und seiner Schwester | Mary, Countess of Howe sd | Johann Christian Fischer dg |
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Dirck Hals
Dutch 1591-1656 Dirck Hals Galleries Dirck Hals (born at Haarlem, 1591-1656) was a Dutch painter of festivals and ballroom scenes. He was influenced by his elder brother Frans Hals.
Luks, George
American Ashcan School Painter, 1866-1933
Johannes Hubertus Leonardus de Haas
(25 March 1832 - 4 August 1908) was a Dutch animal and landscape painter, and a peripheral figure of the Hague School. Born at Hedel, De Haas spend his youth in Amsterdam where he got his first art education at evening-classes at the Koninklijke Academie. Consequently he moved to Haarlem where he was apprenticed to the artist Pieter Frederik van Os. During his stay in Haarlem he befriended Paul Gabriël and Hendrik Dirk Kruseman Van Elten who were also studying with Van Os. In 1853, together with his two friends, De Haas decided to go to Oosterbeek. Here they came into contact with the influential landscape painter Johannes Warnardus Bilders and the group of painters which had gathered around him, many of whom would later be part of the Hague School. De Haas also met his future wife in Oosterbeek, Bilders' daughter, Caroline. In 1855 he received good reviews for his pictures that were exhibited in Paris from the noted art critic Jean Baptiste Gustave Planche. In 1857 De Haas first went to Brussels, where he became friends with Willem Roelofs. De Haas frequently returned to the Netherlands and Oosterbeek for inspiration and Caroline. From 1860 his friend Gabriël also lived in Brussels, and De Haas often painted cattle in the landscapes of both Roelofs and Gabriel, fitting in perfectly with both their styles. In 1860 he won the gold medal at the exhibition of Utrecht. From 1861 until 1869 De Haas is permanently settled in Brussels, painting mainly on the coasts of Flanders and Picardie in northern France. He married Caroline Bilders in 1862, and in 1864 they are briefly joined by her brother, the promising painter Gerard Bilders. In 1865 Caroline dies at the age of 24 of tuberculosis, leaving him with a young son. During his stay in Brussels De Haas is instrumental in passing on the style of the Barbizon school to the painters at Oosterbeek.