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 :. | Detail of Portrait of Mr and Mrs Andrews | Self-Portrait | Robert Butcher of Walthamstan | Portrait of a Girl and Boy | The Lady-s Last Stake |
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Gaspare Diziani
(1689 - 17 August 1767) was an Italian painter of the late-Baroque or Roccoco period, active mainly in the Veneto but also in Dresden and Munich. His earliest training was in his native town of Belluno with Antonio Lazzarini, then moved to Venice, to the studio of Gregorio Lazzarini and later that of Sebastiano Ricci. He was seven years older, but otherwise his career was contemporary with the Lazzarini and Ricci fellow-pupil, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. Between 1710-1720, he painted a group of eight pictures that included the Mary Magdalene for the church of San Stefano in Belluno, and Entry into Jerusalem for San Teodoro in Venice. He also painted three frescoes on the Life of Saint Helena in the Scuola del Vin next to the church of San Silvestro. Dizianies celerity and technical assurance are evident preparatory oil sketches, with color applied in rapid and spirited strokes. He was also working as a scenery painter for the theater and opera in Venice, Munich (1717), and later in Dresden, working with Alessandro Mauro. Diziani was invited to Rome by Cardinal Ottoboni in 1726, to paint a emagnificent decoration for the church of San Lorenzo in Damaso. The decoration is now known only through an engraving by Claude Vasconi. The Sala dei Pastelli in Ca' Rezzonico has an sotto in su allegorical ceiling fresco presenting Triumph of Poetry (Poetry surrounded by Painting, Architecture, Music and Sculpture).
Hendrick van Somer
Hendrick van Someren, or Somer (1615, Amsterdam - 1685, Amsterdam), was a Dutch Golden Age painter. According to Houbraken he was the son of the "van Zomeren" who took in the young Adriaen Brouwer after he fled Frans Hals' workshop to try his luck in Amsterdam. Houbraken claimed Henrik van Someren was a good painter of historical allegories, landscapes, and flower still lifes. According to the RKD no works survive in the styles Houbraken mentioned, only "hermits" in the style of Ribera. He was the son of the painter Barend van Someren and the grandson of Aert Mijtens. He was the pupil of Jusepe de Ribera and at least one of his works had a forged signature of Ribera.He is possibly the same painter sometimes referred to as Enrico Fiammingo.
Pietro Graziani
Active in Naples during the first half of the 18th Century