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 :. | Marjor John Dade of Tannington,Suffolk | Mrs Mary Robinson (mk25 | The Honourable mas graham mars Graham was one of the many society beauties Gainsborough painted in order to make a living | Portrait of Edward Ligonier | Mr and Mrs Andrews |
Related Artists:
Albert Dubois-Pillet
French, 1846-1890.was a French painter and army officer. He graduated from the École Imp??riale Militaire at Saint-Cyr in 1867. He fought the Franco-Prussian War, during which he was made prisoner by the Germans. He started painting after the war, inspired by the Neoimpressionists.
shah-u-gada
In Vishnudharmottara Purana, Kubera is described as the embodiment of both Artha ("wealth, prosperity, glory") and Arthashastras, treatises related to it and his iconography mirrors it. Kubera's complexion is described as that of lotus leaves. He rides a man - the state personified, adorned in golden clothes and ornaments, symbolizing his wealth. His left eye is yellow. He wears a armour and necklace upto his large belly. His face should be inclined to the left, sporting a beard and moustache and with two small tusks protruding from the ends of his mouth, representing his powers to punish and bestow favours. His wife Riddhi - representing the journey of life - is seated on his left lap, with her left hand on the back of Kubera and right holding a ratna-patra ("jewel-pot"). He should be four-armed, holding a gada (mace - symbol of dandaniti - administration of justice) and a shakti (power) in his left pair and standards bearing a lion - representing artha and a shibika (a club, the weapon of Kubera). The nidhi treasures Padma and Shankha stand besides him in human forms with their heads emerging from a lotus and a conch respectively. Agni Purana states that Kubera should be installed in temples as seated on a goat with club in his hand. Kubera's image is prescribed to be of gold with multi-coloured attributes
Vyacheslav Schwarz
painted The Spring Pilgrimage of the Tsarina, under Tsar Aleksy Mihailovich in 1868