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 :. | Two Daughters with a Cat | Mr and Mrs Andrews | Rest on the Way | Portrai of Mary,Mrs John Vere | Gainsborough Mr and Mrs Andrews |
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Paul Maitland
British Painter, 1863-1909
Egbert van der Poel
Egbert van der Poel (Delft, 1621 - Rotterdam, 1664) was a Dutch Golden Age genre and landscape painter, son of a Delft goldsmith. He may possibly have been a student of Esaias van de Velde and of Aert van der Neer. According to the RKD he was the brother of the painter Adriaen Lievensz van der Poel and a student of Cornelis Saftleven in Rotterdam. Van der Poel was registered with the Guild of St Luke in Delft on October 17, 1650, where he is listed as a landscape painter. In 1651 van der Poel married Aeltgen Willems van Linschooten in Maassluis, near Rotterdam. His most famous paintings depict the Delft gunpowder explosion of October 12, 1654 and its aftermath; he and his wife were living in the area at the time. Egbert and Aeltgen van der Poel had a son and three daughters. He died in Rotterdam in 1664.
Francois-Auguste Biard
(June 30, 1799 - June 20, 1882) was a French genre painter. Born at Lyon, he traveled around the world, sketching on the way. He was particularly successful in rendering burlesque groups. His painting, Scenes on the Coast of Africa, depicted on the right, was the inspiration behind Isaac Julien's short film The Attendant (1993). Biard was a known abolitionist against the Atlantic slave trade. Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Auguste François Biard This article incorporates text from the public domain 1907 edition of The Nuttall Encyclopædia.