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 :. | Drinkstone Park | Mrs.Grace Dalrymply Elliott | Detail of Landscape with a Peasant on a path | Dr.Isaac Henrique Sequeira | Portrait of Lady Margaret Georgiana Poyntz later Margaret Georgiana Spencer, Countess Spencer |
Related Artists:
John Robert Cozens
British 1752-1797 ). Painter, draughtsman and printmaker, son of (1) Alexander Cozens. He was taught by his father, and an album by John Robert (Aberystwyth, N. Lib. Wales) indicates that he also learnt to sketch landscape directly from nature. The album contains drawings that record sketching tours to Nacton, near Ipswich, Suffolk (Aug 1768); day trips to the outskirts of London: Greenwich and Blackheath (1768, 1771), Epsom (1768) and Hampstead (1770-71); and a trip to Matlock, Derbys (June 1772). The earliest of these sketches are careful pencil drawings, some later reworked in pen, ink and wash, and there is at least one attempt at added colour. Later drawings are freer, either noting an idea for a composition or recording light and shade with rapid washes of ink over pencil. His father worked mainly in monochrome brown or grey washes, and John Robert earliest exhibits (he exhibited at the Society of Artists every year from 1767 to 1771) were also in this medium.
Pier Francesco Mola
(9 February 1612 - 13 May 1666) was an Italian painter of the High Baroque, mainly active around Rome. Mola was born at Coldrerio (now in Ticino, Switzerland). At the age of four, he moved to Rome with his father Giovanni Battista, a painter. With the exception of the years 1633 - 40 and 1641 - 47, during which he resided in Venice and Bologna, respectively, he lived for the rest of his life in Rome. His early training was with the late mannerist painter Cavalier D'Arpino, and he worked under the classicizing Francesco Albani. His masterpiece is the fresco in the gallery of Alexander VII in the Quirinal Palace Gallery, entitled Joseph making himself known to his Brethren (1657). He made six versions of The Flight into Egypt, the earileist and best of which is the first one, The Rest on the Flight into Egypt. He was elected Principe of the Accademia di San Luca, the Roman artists' professional association, in 1662, but his last years were neither profitable nor prolific. One of his pupils was Antonio Gherardi. With his looser style and handling, more naturalistic palette, and interest in exploring landscape elements, Mola rebelled against the prevailing, highly-theoretical classicism of such leading 17th-century Roman painters as Andrea Sacchi.
Louis Gallait
(9 or 10 May 1810 - 20 November 1887) was a Belgian painter. His d his reputation especially with the large painting of Charles V's abdication. Gallait's works were considered as the basis for a desirable renewal of historical paintings because of the realism, costume faithfulness and colorful posture of his paintings. His last artwork was sent on tour in Germany and that led to new signals even among German historians. He was also a distinguished portrait painter. Gallait died in Brussels in 1887. There is a painting by Louis Gallait at the Norton Art Museum in West Palm Beach, Florida ("Art and Liberty").