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 | Detail of Portrait of Sarah,Mrs Tobias Rustat | View in Suffolk | Mr and Mrs Andrews | Self portrait |
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PORCELLIS, Jan
Flemish Baroque Era Painter, ca.1580-1632
Frank Mahony
(4 December 1862 - 28 June 1916) was an Australian artist and member of the Dawn and Dusk Club. Although christened "Francis Mahony", he later added 'Prout' and usually signed his work 'Frank P. Mahony'. Mahony was born in Melbourne, third surviving child of Timothy Mahony, an Irish-born contractor, and his Cornish second wife Elizabeth, Johns. Mahony was taken to Sydney when 10 years old and studied at the Academy of Art under Giulio Anivitti.Mahony's work was accepted by The Bulletin and he became known for his excellent drawings of horses. In 1889 his oil painting Rounding up a Straggler, was bought for the Art Gallery of New South Wales; in 1896 The Cry of the Mothers was also purchased.Mahony did a lot of illustrative work for the Picturesque Atlas of Australia, Victoria and its Metropolis, the Antipodean and other magazines of the period, and was also responsible for some of the illustrations to Barcroft Boake's Where the Dead Men Lie.
Henry Alken Jnr
British 1810-94