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 Edward Ligonier, 1st Earl Ligonier | Cornard wood | Lady Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire | Self-Portrait | Portrait of Hon.Charles Hamilton |
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James Augustus Suydam
(1819-1865) architect, lawyer, and artist; as an artist was considered one of the premier Luminism painters. He is widely known as an American landscape painter and one of the leading members of the Hudson River School. James Augustus Suydam was descended from an old New York Dutch merchant family. He graduated from New York University (then the University of the City of New York), and began his career as a businessman but turned a significant portion of his energies to painting, studying under famed artist and portrait painter Minor C. Kellogg. At the age of thirty he was elected to the Century Association. One of the "regulars" who gathered to paint at North Conway, New Hampshire, he exhibited Conway Meadows at the New York Athenaeum and Boston Athenaeum. He opened his studio at the noted 10th Street Studio Building, New York City, in 1858. The following year he was elected an honorary professional member in the prestigious National Academy of Design, which granted him full membership in 1861. He died suddenly in North Conway at the age of 46. James Suydam was described by his friend, the accomplished artist Sanford Robinson Gifford as a "thoroughly educated and accomplished man. " In addition to his work as an artist, which he began only after working in law and architecture, he was widely read and well-versed in history, philosophy, and the sciences. His work as a landscape painter reflects this breadth of knowledge and reveals Suydam as a deeply spiritual individual. Using his familiarity with science, Suydam reduced nature to calm, clean, planar forms, and then distorted proportional relations so that God's creations loomed superior over the work of man. The National Academy has most of his works such as Paradise Rocks (1865), and the Taft family's Taft Museum also holds works. The Taft also has a podcast website for this artist. A painting of Gifford's from 1859 which Suydam, according to a report, "donated to the [National] academy in 1865," became the subject of a deaccession controversy at the Academy in late 2008.