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 :. | Miss Ann Ford | Portrait of Carl Friedrich Abel German composer | Self portrait | Portrait of Carl Friedrich Abel | Portrait of Edward Ligonier, 1st Earl Ligonier |
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Charles Howard Hodges
(1764, Portsmouth - July 24, Amsterdam), was a British painter active in the Netherlands during the French occupation of 18th and early 19th century. Charles Howard Hodges had visited Amsterdam in 1788; after a two-year stay in Dublin, he moved with his family to The Hague in 1792. In Amsterdam, he worked as an artist, specialized in the mezzotint technique and pastel. In 1797, he and his family moved to Amsterdam, where he lived with his teacher Johann Friedrich August Tischbein at the Prinsengracht Ne 205. There, he became a famous painter of portraits; he painted over 700 portraits of the rich and famous of that time. He was also an engraver, printer, art dealer and a member of the Amsterdam art club Felix Meritis. He is well-known for the fact that he painted all the leaders of the Netherlands during the Napoleonic Period, -a turbulent period in Dutch history, since the Netherlands went through 5 different political systems: stadtholder Willem V of the Republic of the United Netherlands, Grand Pensionary Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck of the Batavian Republic, King Louis Bonaparte (King of Holland), Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte and king William I of the Netherlands. The only known portrait of Sebald Justinus Brugmans was made by him. A design for the honorary cross of the Order of the Union was rejected by Louis Bonaparte. Hodges advised the Dutch government in 1815 with the return of thousands of works of art, which were confiscated by the French in 1795 from several collections, including the Gallery of Prince William V (the first museum open to the public in the Netherlands), and the several collections of the previous stadtholders. Not all the stolen art was returned from Paris, and it is said that several pieces are still held in the Louvre up to this day. Most of the over 700 portraits by Hodges are made in the early 19th century, the earlier works in pastel, and later work in oil paint. Several of these portraits can be found in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, in museums and castles and in royal and private collections. Charles Howard Hodges was father and teacher to James Newman Hodges, een lesser painter who worked in the Rijksmuseum when it was still located in the Trippenhuis in Amsterdam.
Ludovic Piette
French Painter, 1826-1878.French painter. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris during the 1850s under Isidore Pils and Thomas Couture. He attended classes at the Acad?mie Suisse and made his Salon d?but in 1857 with The Scorpion Broom (ex-Mus. B.-A., Rouen). His early works were often based on literary sources and include The Phantoms (exh. Salon 1859) and The Witches Appearing to Macbeth (exh. Salon 1861). Piette only exhibited at the Salon on two further occasions (1872 and 1876), preferring instead to sell his work at auction in the H?tel Drouot. In the early 1860s he abandoned literary subjects in favour of working directly from nature, a shift that probably relates to his developing friendship with Camille Pissarro. This association is first documented by Pissarros portrait of Piette in his Studio (1861; Dr and Mrs Jordan H. Trafimow priv. col.) and an important correspondence between the two artists from 1863 to 1877 survives. Piette portrayed Pissarro painting out of doors (c. 1870; priv. col., see Pissarro, exh. cat., ACGB, 1980, no. 322).
Edward lamson Henry
A popular and prolific genre artists at the end of the 19th century American , 181-1919 American painter. He received his first art instruction in New York from Walter M. Oddie (1808-65), followed by two years at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia (1858-60). After this he left for a two-year stay abroad, studying with Paul Weber (1823-1916), Charles Gleyre and Courbet. In 1864 he served as a captain's clerk on a boat taking supplies to the Union army. Two notable pictures that emerged from this experience were City Point, Virginia, Headquarters of General Grant (1865-72; Andover, MA, Phillips Acad., Addison Gal. A.) and Westover Mansion (1869; Washington, DC, Corcoran Gal. A.). He soon won recognition and was elected to the National Academy by 1869. Many of his paintings were sold before exhibition,