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.William Hallett | Portrait of Georgiana | Suffolk landscape | Mr and Mrs Andrews | Count Rumford |
Related Artists:
Biljert, Jan Hermansz. van
Dutch, approx. 1597-1671
Chandler Winthrop
American Colonial Era Painter, 1747-1790 American painter. He was one of ten children of William Chandler, a farmer, and Jemima Bradbury Chandler of Woodstock, CT. After the death of his father in 1754 and on reaching the age for apprenticeship, Chandler pursued a career as a portrait and ornamental painter. While there is no proof of his presence in Boston, the History of Woodstock (1862) states that he studied portrait painting there. He may also have had the opportunity to view works by the major artist of the city, John Singleton Copley, as well as those of his lesser-known contemporaries, William L. Johnston and Joseph Badger. In the course of his career, Chandler worked in such diverse trades as gilding, carving and illustrating, as well as portraiture, landscape and house painting, suggesting that he received some instruction as an artisan-painter.
CODAZZI, Viviano
Italian Baroque Era Painter, 1604-1670 Italian painter. He arrived in Naples about 1634, having almost certainly trained in Rome. He was a specialist in the realistic architectural VEDUTA, and his interest in this theme may have been stimulated in Rome by the quadratura frescoes of Agostino Tassi and by the urban views of Claude Lorrain and Herman van Swanevelt.