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 :. | Rest on the Way | Portrait of John Gainsbourough | Details of The mall in St.James's Park | The Painter's Daughters Chasing a Butterfly | Mr and Mrs Andrews |
Related Artists:
Meckel, Adolf von
German, 1856-1893
BAILLY, David
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1584-1657 Dutch painter and draughtsman. The son of a Flemish immigrant who was a calligrapher and fencing-master, Bailly was apprenticed to a local surgeon-painter and then to Cornelius van der Voort (1576-1624), a portrait painter in Amsterdam. In the winter of 1608 he started out as a journeyman, spending a year in Hamburg and then travelling through several German cities to Venice and Rome. On the return voyage he visited several courts in Germany, working for local princes, including the Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenb?ttel. While no works survive from the immediate period following his return to the Netherlands in 1613, descriptions in old sale catalogues suggest that he may have produced history paintings in the manner of his contemporaries Pieter Lastman and the Pynas brothers.
Jacob Gerritsz. Cuyp
was a portrait and landscape painter. He was born and died in Dordrecht, and was the half-brother of Benjamin Gerritsz Cuyp and the father of the much more famous Aelbert Cuyp. According to Houbraken, he helped the painters Jacques de Claeuw, Isaac van Hasselt, and Cornelis Tegelberg set up a Guild of Saint Luke in Dordrecht in 1642.