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 :. | Mr and Mrs William Hallett (The Morning Walk) | Ritt zum Markt | The Artist-s Daughters with a Cat | Landscape in Suffolk sdg | Six studies of a cat |
Related Artists:
Bernardo Lopez
1801-1874 Spanish Bernardo Lopez Gallery
Januarius Zick
German,1730-1797 was a painter and architect. He is considered to be the one of the main masters of the Late-Baroque. Januarius Zick was born in Munich and began to learn his trade from his father, Johannes Zick, a renowned painter himself, to whom he was apprenticed in order to learn how to paint frescoes. In 1744, when Januarius Zick was fourteen years old, his brother, three years his junior, fell to his death from a scaffolding in Weingarten. From 1745 to 1748, Januarius Zick was apprenticed as a bricklayer to Jakob Emele in Schussenried. Having finished his apprenticeship, he worked, together with his father, at the residence of the Prince-Bishop of Wurzburg and then, until the mid-1750s, at the residence of the Prince-Bishop of Speyer in Bruchsal. In 1756, Januarius Zick went to Paris to further his education. There, he came into contact with artists and art connoiseurs from Rome, Basel and Augsburg, who broadened his horizon concerning his art and had a considerable influence on him. After having furnished Castle Engers near Neuwied with frescoes in 1760, he was appointed court painter to the Prince-Elector of Trier, the archbishop of Trier. He married in Ehrenbreitstein and settled there. After 1774, he also designed intarsia paintings for cabinet maker David Roentgen. From the late 1770s on, Januarius Zick was very active in Upper Swabia, furnishing a number of monastery churches and parish churches with frescoes and altarpieces.
Rudolf von Alt
(28 August 1812 in Vienna C 12 March 1905 in Vienna) was an Austrian landscape and architectural painter. Borne as Rudolf Alt, he could call himself von Alt and bear the title of a Ritter (knight) after he gained nobility in 1882. He was the son of the famous lithographer Jakob Alt (1789-1872). He studied at the Akademie der bildenden K??nste in Vienna. Hiking-trips through the Austrian Alps and northern Italy awoke a love for landscapes, and he painted with his brush using watercolors in a very realistic and detailed style. In 1833, inspired by a visit to Venice and neighbouring cities, he also made a number of architectural paintings. Alt demonstrated a remarkable talent for expressing certain peculiarities in nature. He managed to paint nature authentically by focusing on the different hues of sky, the colour-tone of the air and the vegetation. His later works came closer to Impressionism. His perspectives on architecture were interesting, and he often chose everyday objects to paint. The painting of interior-views also became one of his strong points, giving him attention in Vienna.