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 :. | Portrait of the Queen Charlotte | The Marsham Children | Self-Portrait | The Idle-Prentice at Play in the Church Yard during Divine Service | Lady and Gentleman in a Landscape (mk08) |
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Giovanni Domenico Cerrini
(1609-1681), also called Gian Domenico Cerrini or il Cavalier Perugino, was an Italian painter of the Baroque period, active mainly in Rome and influenced in large part by painter of the Bolognese School. Born in Perugia, Cerrini initially apprenticed under Giovanni Antonio Scaramuccia, then in 1638 moved into the Roman studio of Guido Reni, but strongly influenced by Lanfranco, Guercino, Domenichino, and Andrea Sacchi. He was patronized by the family of Cardinal Bernardino Spada. Cardinal Giulio Rospigliosi gave him the commission to decorate the cupola of Santa Maria della Vittoria (1654-5). His style has the monumental clarity of Domenichino, but somewhat sapped of vitality. Paintings of his can be found in many of the churches of Rome, where he died, including Santa Maria in Traspontina, San Carlino alle Quattro Fontane, Chiesa Nuova, San Carlo ai Catinari, Santissimo Sudario dei Piemontesi, Sant??Isidoro, as well as in Galleria Colonna, Palazzo Spada, and the Palazzo Corsini art gallery.
Alden J Weir
1852-1919 Painter, printmaker and teacher, son of (1) Robert Walter Weir. His art education began in the studio of his father. There he and his half-brother (2) John Ferguson Weir acquired an appreciation for the Old Masters, particularly of the Italian Renaissance and of the 17th-century Dutch schools. While Weir pursued in his art a course very different from that of his father and half-brother, his personality as well as his artistic attitudes were shaped by them. In the winters of 1870-71 and 1871-2, he continued his studies at the National Academy of Design in New York, where his instructor was Lemuel Wilmarth (1835-1918).
Armand-Vincent de Montpetit
painted Louis XV King of France and Navarre in 1774