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 :. | Mr and Mrs Andrews | The Artist-s Daughters with a Cat | Konstnarens dottrar jaggr a fjaril | Lady Sheffield | View in Suffolk |
Related Artists:
George Desmarees
was born in 1697 at Stockholm, where he was instructed in painting by Peter Martin van Meytens, whose assistant he afterwards became. In 1724 he made a stay in Amsterdam, and in the following year in Nuremberg and then in Venice, where he received further tuition from Piazzetta. In 1731 he settled in Munich, where he became court painter, and where he continued to reside till his death in 1776. A portrait of himself and one of his daughter are, with a third in the Munich Gallery, and other portraits by him are at Augsburg.
Jozef Chelmonski
(November 7, 1849 - April 6, 1914) was a Polish painter. Chełmoki was born in the village of Boczki near Łowicz in central Congress Poland, Russian Empire. His first drawing teacher was his father (a small leaseholder and administrator of Boczki village). After finishing high school in Warsaw, Jozef studied in Warsaw Drawing Class (1867-1871) and took private lessons from Wojciech Gerson. From 1871 to 1874 Chełmoki lived in Munich. He worked with Polish painters assembled around Jozef Brandt and Maksymilian Gierymski. There, he also studied for a few months at the academy of H. Anschutz and A. Strahuber. In 1872 and 1874 Chełmoki visited the Polish Territories (Poland, as an independent country, did not exist during this time), Tatra Mountains and Ukraine. His first paintings were done under the influence of Gerson. The works that followed were landscapes and villages. In 1875 Chełmoki went to Paris, where he had many important exhibitions and became known to the art scene. With many orders, the artistic level of his paintings decreased. From 1878 to 1887 Chełmoki visited Poland, Vienna and Venice. In 1887 he returned to Poland and in 1889 settled in the village of Kuklewka Zarzeczna. Contact with his homeland and nature are qualities revealed in his artworks. From that time are the best liked, or the most beloved of Chełmoki's paintings are paintings such as Partridge on the Snow, The Storks or Before Thunderstorm. Chełmoki represented the trend in art called "Polish Patriotic Painting". He died in Kuklewka near Grodzisk Mazowiecki in 1914.
Lhermitte, Leon
French Realist Painter, 1844-1925 was a French painter and etcher of the late nineteenth century. A student of Lecocq de Boisbourdran, he was a realist artist whose primary subject matter was of rural scenes depicting the peasant worker. He gained recognition after his show in the Paris Salon in 1864. His many awards include the French Legion of Honour (1884) and the Grand Prize at the Exposition Universelle in 1889. Lhermitte's innovative use of the then contemporary media of pastels won him the admiration of his contemporaries. Vincent Van Gogh wrote that If every month Le Monde Illustr published one of his compositions... it would be a great pleasure for me to be able to follow it. It is certain that for years I have not seen anything as beautiful as this scene by Lhermitte