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 :. | Self Portrait ss | Self-portrait | Portrait of Ann Ford | Portrait of a Girl and Boy | The Suffolk Plough |
Related Artists:
Maerten van heemskerck
Dutch Northern Renaissance Painter, 1498-1574 Dutch painter, draughtsman and print designer. He was among the second generation of Netherlandish artists to travel to Italy, where he was profoundly affected by the work of contemporary artists in Rome and by the examples of Classical sculpture to be seen in the city (see ROMANISM). On his return to the north, van Heemskerck had a long and successful career. His extensive oeuvre (over 100 paintings) comprises large altarpieces, portraits and smaller works (with both religious and mythological subjects). He also produced a vast number of drawings for prints. He helped spread the influence of Michelangelo and Giulio Romano in the northern Netherlands, through his strong, monumental style, with much emphasis on anatomical detail. He was thus an important figure in the dissemination of late Mannerism in northern Europe
Ernst Oppler
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COELLO, Claudio
Spanish Baroque Era Painter, 1642-1693 Spanish painter and draughtsman. Together with the court painters Francisco Rizi, Juan Carre?o de Miranda and Francisco de Herrera, he was one of the foremost exponents of a style of Spanish painting that developed between c. 1660 and 1700 and was characterized by theatrical compositions and rich colours. The sources of this late Baroque style, which was distinct from that of the previous generation of Spanish Baroque artists, most of whom painted sober, realistic depictions of religious and secular life, lie in the influence exerted by Venetian Renaissance painting and by Italian and Flemish art of the period,