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 | Princess Augusta aged | Portrait of Mrs Margaret Gainsborough | Ritratto | Lady Alston (mk05) |
Related Artists:
Dirk van Delen
(born ca. 1605 - died May 16, 1671) was a Dutch Golden Age painter. According to Houbraken, he was born in Heusden, and was a student of Frans Hals. In 1626 he moved to Zeeland and became mayor of Arnemuiden. He specialized in architectural studies. Shortly after he was born his parents moved to Breda. He married in Middelburg in 1625. Though he is registered in Arnemuiden from the following year until his death, he became a member of the Middelburg Guild of St. Luke from 1639-1665. In 1666 he gave a painting to the Antwerp chamber of rhetoric Olyftak, that was a collaboration with the painter Theodoor Boeyermans. In 1668 he became a member of the Olyftak. The staffage of his baroque churches has at times been attributed to other painters, such as Anthonie Palamedesz, Dirck Hals, and Pieter Codde. He died in Arnemuiden.
Cornelis de Vos
1585-1651 Flemish Cornelis de Vos Gallery Flemish portrait and figure painter. He was a contemporary of Rubens, who sent many sitters to him. Although of the school of Rubens, Vos developed an individual style of portraiture in which cool grays predominate. His representations of children were particularly successful. An example of his many portraits is that of Abraham Grapheus (Antwerp). His brother, Paulus de Vos, c.1596?C1678, was an excellent painter of animals and hunting scenes. His paintings show the influence of his brother-in-law, Frans Snyders. His work is best seen in the museums of Madrid and St. Petersburg.
MOR VAN DASHORST, Anthonis
Netherlandish Painter, ca.1517-1577