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 :. | Portrait of James Christie | Self-portrait | Diana and Actaeon (mk25) | Portrait of John Gainsbourough | Grace Elliott |
Related Artists:
Henry Walton
British Painter , c 1746-1813 He studied in London under Johan Zoffany c. 1769, after which he completed his training at the Maiden Lane Academy. It was probably Zoffany who introduced Walton to the conversation piece, a genre in which he was to specialize. The Cricket Scene at Harrow School (1771; priv. col., see 1963 exh. cat., no. 1) reveals Walton's debt to Zoffany, but it also shows him to be an exceptional colourist and able to compose his figures with a sense of rare warmth and intimacy. By c. 1778, when he painted the Rev. Charles Tyrrell with his Family
Trigoulet Eugene
French ,1867-Berck-sur-Mer 1910
Francis Swaine
1720-1783,English painter and draughtsman. He worked as a messenger for a department of His Majesty's Navy in 1735 and seems to have been practising as a marine painter by the late 1740s, but there is little trace of his place in London's art world until his regular contributions from 1761 to the exhibitions of both the Free and Incorporated Societies of Artists. He was awarded the Society for the Encouragement of Arts' second prize for sea-pieces in 1764 and again in 1765. 'About the year 1770', reported Edwards, 'he painted the face of a wind-dial, with sea and ships, which he executed with a great neatness'