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 :. | Thomas Graham | Mrs Thomas Hibbert. Neue Pinakothek. | Grace Elliott | Ritratto | Portrait of the painter Gainsborough Dupont |
Related Artists:
LONGHI, Pietro
Italian Rococo Era Painter, ca.1702-1785 Painter and draughtsman. His father, Alessandro Falca, encouraged his natural talent for drawing, and he studied under Antonio Balestra for 'several years', according to his son, Alessandro Longhi. Balestra probably took Pietro to Bologna and recommended him to Giuseppe Maria Crespi. No documents exist on Longhi until 1732, the year he married, and some doubt has been expressed about his study with Crespi. There is no trace of Crespi's influence in Longhi's altarpiece for the parish church of S Pellegrino in Bologna, St Pellegrino Condemned to Death, installed in 1732; Crespi's style is an intimate one, however, and would have been inappropriate for such a large altarpiece. One of Longhi's first independent works, the St Pellegrino altarpiece recalls his Venetian origins and training in its broken brushwork and colour glazes. In another early work, the Adoration of the Magi (Venice, Scuola Grande S Giovanni Evangelista), documented in 1733 as at S Maria Materdomini, Venice, the subject-matter lends itself to a more domestic treatment, and Crespi's influence is evident. Both these works contain passages anticipating Longhi's subsequent development as a genre painter; in each picture a boy or young man, perhaps a self-portrait, gazes out at the spectator, unconcerned with events in the painting.
Bicci Di Neri
(1419-1491) was an Italian painter of the Renaissance. A prolific painter of mainly religious themes, he was active mainly in Florence and in the medium of tempera. His father was Bicci di Lorenzo. His grandfather, Lorenzo di Bicci was also a painter in Florence, a pupil of Spinello Aretino. Neri di Bicci's main works include a St. John Gualbert Enthroned, with Ten Saints for the church of Santa Trinita, an Annunciation (1464) in the Florentine Academy, two altarpieces in the Diocesan Museum of San Miniato, a Madonna with Child Enthroned in the Pinacoteca Nazionale of Siena, and a Coronation of the Virgin (1472) in the abbey church at San Pietro a Ruoti (Bucine. He also painter numerous works in the area of Volterra. His journals from the years 1453-1475, including the rates of remuneration for his work, are still preserved in the library of the Uffizi Gallery. They are known as Ricordanze.
Joseph Allen
1780 - 1860