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 :. | Karl Friedrich Abel | Miss Anne Ford (mk08) | Sarah Siddons | Gainsborough Daughter Mary | Mrs. Siddons |
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Stanislaw Chlebowski
(1835-1884) was a Polish painter with Russian and Turkish connections. He was a renowned specialist in oriental themes. Chlebowski was born in Podole, and learned drawing in Odessa. Between 1853-1859, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, and then on a scholarship for six years in Paris as the pupil of the French orientalist painter Jean-Leon Gerôme. Chlebowski traveled to Spain, Italy, Germany, and Belgium. His first success was selling his painting "Joanne deArc in Amiens prisone to Napoleon III of France In the years 1864-1876 Chlebowski was master painter for Sultan Abdelaziz and took up residence in Constantinople. Chlebowski became popular with the Sultanate. During his services, he had obtained permission to bring with him a large Icon of Mother of God Leading our Way having been rescued from a Odegon Monastry in 1453. He had come across it in one of the magasins with old relics, unheeded by the Ottoman keeper. This account is certified in a letter by Comite National Polonais a Constantinople, dated June 27, 1938. In 1876 he moved to Paris. In 1881 he returned permanently to Krakow. The subject matter of his watercolors and oil paintings is diverse. He painted images of historical battles related to the history of Turkey, oriental genre scenes, landscapes, and portraits of Sultans. He died near Poznae in Kowanewko at age 49. Chlebowski lived abroad for a long time and as a result his paintings were very rare in Poland. The National Museum in Krakow houses some of his other important Orientalist works such as "Entree de Mahomet II e Stamboul".
henry wadsworth longfellow
1807-C82, American poet, b. Portland, Maine, grad. Bowdoin College, 1825. He wrote some of the most popular poems in American literature, in which he created a new body of romantic American legends. Descended from an established New England family, after college he spent the next three years in Europe, preparing himself for a professorship of modern languages at Bowdoin, where he taught from 1829 to 1835. After the death of his young wife in 1835, Longfellow traveled again to Europe, where he met Frances Appleton, who was to become his second wife after a long courtship. She was the model for the heroine of his prose romance, Hyperion (1839). From 1836 to 1854, Longfellow was professor of modern languages at Harvard, and during these years he became one of an intellectual triumvirate that included Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell. Although a sympathetic and ethical person, Longfellow was uninvolved in the compelling religious and social issues of his time; he did, however, display interest in the abolitionist cause.
Johann Michael Franz
Seine Eltern waren der Zimmermeister Jakob Franz , und Anna geb. Lueger. Seine Ausbildung genoss er im Umkreis des Augsburger Reichsstädtischen Kunstakademiedirektors Johann Georg Bergmuller (Bergmiller) (1688-1762); nach eigenen Angaben schloss er sie 1733 ab.