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 :. | Mr and Mrs. Andrews | Chasing a Butterfly | Lady Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire | A Cottage Girl with Dog and Pitcher | Portrait of Elizabeth and Charles Bedford |
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Antonie Waldorp
(The Hague, 28 March, 1803 - Amsterdam, 12 October, 1866) was a Dutch painter and a forerunner of the Hague School. Anthonie Waldorp was the son of Abel de Saaijer Waldorp and Jacomina Godde, and the grandson of Jan Gerard Waldor, who was superintendent of the National Art Gallery. On February 25, 1824 he married Johanna Sophia Waldorp van Hove. At the wedding in The Hague there was a clerical error in the marital attachments, mistakenly registering Anthonie as Anthonie Waldorp instead of Saaijer Waldorp. Shortly after his 23rd birthday, Anthonie decides to follow a career as a painter and became one of the precursors of the Hague School. Anthonie took an apprenticeship with the well known stage scenery painter Joannes Breckenheimer jr. (1772-1856) in The Hague, who was also the tutor of the well known painter Andreas Schelfhout. Anthonie started painting stage sceneries like his grandfather. Later he focused on domestic and church interiors and portraits (people in 17th century costumes). Finally he specialized in landscapes, river and seascapes (paintings, drawings and water colors). It proved to be a wise decision as it led to international recognition. He also did some lithographic work. In 1833, together with Wijnand Nuyen, he traveled through France, Belgium and Germany and became the tutor of C.P. et Hoen, J.C. Hofman, C. Rochussen and Johan Hendrik Weissenbruch. Many of his paintings were bought by German, Dutch and French kings. Until 1857 he lived in The Hague, after which he settled in Amsterdam where he joined the Royal Academy . He received several awards: in 1845 Waldorp was appointed Knight of the Order of Leopold by the Belgian king, Knight in the Order of the Dutch Lion in 1847 by King William II and Knight in the Order of the Oak Crown in 1849 by William. In The Hague and Amsterdam there are streets named after Anthonie Waldorp.
VEEN, Otto van
Flemish painter (b. 1556, Leiden, d. 1629, Bruxelles). Flemish painter and draughtsman of Dutch birth. Although born in Holland, he is regarded as an artist of the Catholic southern Netherlands, where he spent most of his active life. He seems to have been acquainted with most of the Netherlandish scholars of his time, and his works testify to his broad humanistic learning. This and his prominent role in the early manifestations of the Counter-Reformation in Antwerp may have led Rubens to choose him as a teacher. Van Veen's importance as an artist has often been compared to the career of his famous pupil, for whom he was certainly the most important exemplar of the pictor doctus or learned painter. Van Veen obviously represents the older generation's more classicizing and conservative response to the Counter-Reformation. For him, the return to the spiritual values of the past also implied a recovery of the pictorial style of the High Renaissance, with its deliberate borrowings from the paintings of such artists as Raphael and Correggio.
Jacob Philipp Hackert
(September 15, 1737 - April 28, 1807) was a landscape painter from Brandenburg, who did most of his work in Italy. Hackert was born in 1737 in Prenzlau in the Margraviate of Brandenburg (now in Germany). He trained with his father Philipp (a portraitist and painter of animals) and his uncle, before going to the Akademie der Kenste in Berlin in 1758. Later he traveled to Swedish Pomerania and Stockholm, where he painted murals. He spent from 1765 to 1768 in Paris, with the Swiss Artist, Balthasar Anton Dunker, where he focused on painting in gouache. He met and was inspired by Claude Joseph Vernet, who was already famous as a painter of landscapes and seascapes, and the German engraver Johann Georg Wille. In 1768 Hackert left Paris with his brother Georg, and went to Italy, basing himself mainly in Rome and Naples, where he produced many works for Sir William Hamilton. He travelled all over Italy, gaining a reputation as a talented landscape painter. In 1786 he went to work for Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies in Naples. He advised on the creation of a painting restoration laboratory at the Museo di Capodimonte, and supervised the transfer of the Farnese collections from Rome to Naples. By this time he had an international reputation, and won commissions from empress Catherine II of Russia, king Louis XVI of France and others. When Goethe visited Naples in 1786, he and Hackert became friends.