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 :. | Mr and Mrs Andrews | Oil painting by Thomas Gainsborough of Count Rumford who was an American born soldier, statesman, scientist, inventor and social reformer. | Portrat der Mrs Richard B Sheridan | Saintes | Self-Portrait |
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Fedor Alekseev
(c. 1753 ?C November 23, 1824) was an early Russian painter of landscape art. After training in the Saint Petersburg Imperial Academy of Arts, he spent three years in Venice studying the works of famous French and Italian landscape painters. Returning to Saint Petersburg to work, his popularity grew over time. In 1800, Emperor Paul of Russia commissioned a series of paintings of Moscow from him.
Leonardo Coccorante
Italian, 1680-1750 , Active in Naples during the frist half of the 18th Century Active in Naples during the frist half of the 18th Century .was an Italian painter who was born in Naples, Italy. He studied with Jan Frans van Bloemen (1662-1749), Angelo Maria Costa (1670-1721), and finally with Gabriele Ricciardelli (active between 1741 and 1777). From 1737 to 1739, he was employed decorating the royal palace of Naples. Coccorante died in Naples in 1750. He is best known for his large highly detailed landscapes with imaginary classical architectural ruins. He often included small figures in the foreground to emphasize the expansiveness of the ruins. Coccorante is classified as a veduta (or vista) painter. The Honolulu Academy of Arts, the Louvre, the Lowe Art Museum (Coral Gables, Florida.), Mus??e d??partemental de l'Oise (Beauvais, France), Mus??e de Grenoble (Grenoble, France), Museo Regionale Agostino Pepoli (Trapani, Italy), and Pinacoteca del Castello Sforzesco (Milan, Italy)
Nikolay Nikanorovich Dubovskoy
Russian, December 17, 1859 - February 28, 1918) was a Russian landscape painter. He studied from 1877 to 1881 at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg under Mikhail Konstantinovich Klodt. In 1886, he became a member of the Peredvizhniki (the Wanderers), a group of Russian painters. In 1900, he became a member of the Academy of Arts.