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 :. | Der Morgenspaziergang | Gainsborough | Detail of The Painter-s Daughters Chasing a Butterfly | Portrai of Mary,Mrs John Vere | Prince Edward Later Duke of Kent (mk25 |
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Tintoretto
Italian Mannerist Painter, ca.1518-1594 His father was a silk dyer (tintore); hence the nickname Tintoretto ("Little Dyer"). His early influences include Michelangelo and Titian. In Christ and the Adulteress (c. 1545) figures are set in vast spaces in fanciful perspectives, in distinctly Mannerist style. In 1548 he became the centre of attention of artists and literary men in Venice with his St. Mark Freeing the Slave, so rich in structural elements of post-Michelangelo Roman art that it is surprising to learn that he had never visited Rome. By 1555 he was a famous and sought-after painter, with a style marked by quickness of execution, great vivacity of colour, a predilection for variegated perspective, and a dynamic conception of space. In his most important undertaking, the decoration of Venice's Scuola Grande di San Rocco (1564 C 88), he exhibited his passionate style and profound religious faith. His technique and vision were wholly personal and constantly evolving.
Francesco Maria Raineri
(February 2, 1676 - February 28, 1758) was an Italian painter of the late-Baroque, mainly active in Mantua. Also called Lo Schivenoglia after the town, just outside of the city of Mantua, of his birth. He was a pupil of Giovanni Canti. Among his works, he was known for his paintings of battle scenes, landscapes, and cappriccios (vedute of imaginary scenes) with historical or mythologic figures. He was named director of the Academy of painters in Mantua in 1752. He is known to have painted a St. Sebastian for the chapel of Santa Anna.
Jules-elie delaunay
French Neoclassical Painter, 1828-1891