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 :. | Sarah,Lady innes | Mrs.Siddons | Landscap with Peasant and Horses | Portrait of Giovanna Baccelli | The Marsham Children |
Related Artists:
Caspar van Wittel
(born Caspar Adriaensz. van Wittel, later a.k.a. Gaspare Vanvitelli, Gasparo degli Occhiali) (1653 - September 13, 1736) was a Dutch Golden Age landscape painter. Van Wittel was born in Amersfoort. He learned painting first from Thomas Jansz van Veenendaal for 4 or 5 years and then from Matthias Withoos for 7 years, until Withoos left Amersfoort. In Amersfoort, he likely was exposed to Dutch landscape artists such as Jan van der Heyden and Gerrit Berckheyde. His first extant works were made in Hoorn in 1672, but he relocated to Rome with his family ca. 1675 and made his career there. Like his former teacher, he joined the Bentvueghels with the nickname "Piktoors" or "Toorts van Amersfoort"(torch of Amersfort). He married in Rome in 1697, and stayed most of his life in that city, though, between 1694 and 1710, he toured Italy and painted in places like Florence, Bologna, Ferrara, Venice, Milan, Piacenza and Naples. He is one of the principal painters of topographical views known as vedute. Gaspar van Wittel died in Rome. His son Luigi would become a famous architect and also carries the italianized family name of Vanvitelli. In Luigi's biography is written that his father was born in July 1656, but Van Wittel's grave in Rome states that he died at the age of 83 in 1736.
Gottlieb Schick
romanticism artist. German, 1776-1812 German painter. He trained at the H?he Karlsschule in Stuttgart (1795-7) under the classically-orientated painter Philipp Friedrich von Hetsch (1758-1839), a pupil of David. Schick also took private lessons (1797-8) with the sculptor Johann Heinrich von Dannecker. From 1799 to 1802 Schick studied in Paris under David, and he soon became one of David's favourite students. He made two unsuccessful attempts to win the Prix de Rome with compositions that derived from the style of David. However, greater independence is seen in his life-size painting Eve (1800; Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz-Mus.), a magnificent allegory of Beauty synthesizing a classically-orientated reinterpretation of ancient art and a proto-Romantic interpretation of biblical subject-matter, inspired by Milton's Paradise Lost. As Schick himself stated (letter to Dannecker, 10 July 1800), he had tried to emulate both the Medici Venus and the female figures of Raphael. In 1802, on a pension from Frederick II, Duke of Werttemburg, Schick moved to Rome and for almost a decade played a leading role in Roman artistic life. His friendship with Joseph Anton Koch led to mutual influence in the work of the two artists. Koch was indebted to Schick for invaluable hints on oil painting and for choice of subjects. For a fortnight in July 1805, Schick exhibited in the Pantheon his large oil painting The Sacrifice of Noah (2.50*3.27 m, 1804; Stuttgart, Staatsgal.). The work was inspired by Raphael's Old Testament frescoes in the Vatican Loggie; and it brought Schick enormous success. Despite financial hardship, Schick continued to work indefatigably, and without waiting for commissions, on a wide variety of projects. These included biblical and mythological subjects as well as portraits. Between 1806 and 1808 he completed his Apollo among the Shepherds (Stuttgart, Staatsgal.), a subject he had attempted while still in Paris and then again in Rome in 1805. The second Rome version had clearly gained through Schick's concentrated thought over a period of several years, and the result represented an avowal of faith both in the artist's own gifts and in German Classicism.
alexis de tocqueville
was born in Paris on July 29, 1805, of an aristocratic Norman family. He studied law in Paris (1823-1826) and then was appointed an assistant magistrate at Versailles (1827).