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 :. | Mrs Philip Thicknesse | Landscap with Peasant and Horses | Study for a Foreground,a Bank with Weeds and Thistles | the blue boy | Mr and Mrs Andrews |
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Fritz von Uhde
German, 1848-1911 was a German painter of genre and religious subjects. His style lay between Realism and .Uhde was born in Wolkenburg, Saxony. In 1866 he was admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts in Dresden, but later that year he left his studies for military service, and from 1867 to 1877 he was a professor of horsemanship to the regiment of the assembled guard. He moved to Munich in 1877 to attend the Academy of Fine Arts. In Munich he particularly admired the Dutch old masters, and in 1879 he travelled to Paris where his studies of the Dutch painters continued under Mihely Munkecsy's supervision. In 1882 a journey to Holland brought about a change in his style, as he abandoned the dark chiaroscuro he had learned in Munich in favor of a colorism informed by the works of the French Impressionists. His work was often rejected by the official art criticism, and by the public, because his representations of ordinary scenes were considered vulagar or ugly. The critic Otto Julius Bierbaum was more sympathetic; in 1893, he wrote, "As a painter of children, for example, Uhde is extraordinarily distinguished. He does not depict them as sweetly as used to be popular; in other words not as amusing or charming dolls, but with extreme, very strict naturalness." In about 1890, Uhde became a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich.
Monticelli, Adolphe-Joseph
French, 1824-1886 French painter. In 1846, after studying at the Ecole d'Art in Marseille, Monticelli left Provence to study in Paris with Paul Delaroche. Although he had been trained to work in a Neo-classical style by his teachers in Marseille, in Paris he admired the Troubadour pictures of such artists as Pierre R?voil and Fleury Richard and the bold colours and rich surface impasto of Delacroix's oil sketches. He also copied many of the Old Masters in the Louvre. When he returned to Marseille in 1847 Emile Loubon (1809-63), newly appointed director of the Ecole de Dessin in Marseille and a friend of many realist landscape painters in Paris, encouraged him and another local painter, Paul Guigou
Artemisia Gentileschi
Italian 1593-1652 Artemisia Gentileschi Gallery Gentileschi was born on July 8, 1593 in Rome. She was the daughter of the painter Orazio Gentileschi and was trained by him. Our perception of Gentileschi has been colored by the legend surrounding her. Her alleged rape by her father colleague, the quadratura painter Agostino Tassi, when she was 17, was the subject of a protracted legal action brought by Orazio in 1611. Although she was subsequently married off to Pietro Antonio di Vicenzo Stiattesi in 1612 and gave birth to at least one daughter, she soon separated from her husband and led a strikingly independent life for a woman of her time - even if there is no firm evidence for the reputation she enjoyed in the 18th century as a sexual libertine. After her marriage, Gentileschi lived in Florence until about 1620. She then worked in Genoa and settled in Naples in 1630. Gentileschi traveled to England in 1638-40, where she collaborated with her father on a series of canvasses for the Queen House, Greenwich (now Marlborough House, London). Gentileschi died in Naples in 1652. It is tempting to adduce the established biographical data in partial explanation of the context of her art: the sympathy and vigor with which she evokes her heroines and their predicaments, and her obsession with that tale of female triumph, Judith and Holofernes. But such possibilities should not distract attention from the high professional standards that Gentileschi brought to her art. In a letter, dated July 3, 1612, to the Grand Duchess of Tuscany, Orazio claimed that "Artemisia, having turned herself to the profession of painting, has in three years so reached the point that I can venture to say that today she has no peer. Despite the obvious exaggeration, one can agree that Gentileschi art was of a consistently high quality virtually from the beginning.