1805-1881
British
Samuel Palmer Galleries
English painter, draughtsman and etcher. Palmer was a key figure of English Romantic painting who represented, at least in his early work, its pastoral, intuitive and nostalgic aspects at their most intense. He is widely described as a visionary and linked with his friend and mentor William Blake, though he stood at an almost opposite extreme in his commitment to landscape and his innocent approach to its imagery. He had none of Blake irony or complexity and was inspired by a passionate love of nature that found its philosophical dimension in unquestioning Neo-Platonism. Related Paintings of Samuel Palmer :. | A Cascade in Shadow,Drawn on the Spot,near the Function of the Machno and Conway,North Wales | Assumption | Cart Shed and Lane | Classical River Scene | The Willow | Related Artists:
NEER, Aert van derDutch Baroque Era Painter, ca.1603-1677
Dutch landscape painter. Working mostly in Amsterdam, he excelled in painting unusual light effects, such as moonlight, sunsets, conflagrations, and glimmering light on snow and ice. His winter landscapes are among the best in Dutch art. He is well represented in many European galleries. The Metropolitan Museum has his Sunset, The Farrier, and Landscape. His son and pupil, Eglon Hendrik van der Neer, 1634C1703, was a genre, landscape, and portrait painter. He was court painter to the elector palatine in Desseldorf. He excelled in painting luxurious interiors, hunting scenes, and mythological or biblical subjects in Dutch settings.
GAINSBOROUGH, ThomasEnglish 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.
Bonaguida, Pacino diItalian, active 1303-1330