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 :. | A Coastal Landscape | Diana and Actaeon (mk25) | Self-Portrait | Miss Ann Ford | The Idle-Prentice at Play in the Church Yard during Divine Service |
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Abraham Storck
Abraham Storck (or Sturckenburch) (bapt. April 17, 1644 - buried April 8, 1708), was a Dutch landscape and maritime painter of the Baroque era. Storck was born and died in Amsterdam, and came from a family of painters of the same name. He had a painter's studio in Amsterdam producing naval and harbor scenes as well as landscape paintings. He was influenced by the two Willem van de Veldes (the elder and the younger) and by Jan Abrahamsz Beerstraaten.
Phillips, Thomas
English, 1770-1845 From a respectable but impoverished family, he left school aged 13 to be apprenticed to Francis Eginton of Birmingham, a glass painter and early pioneer in reproduction by a 'photographic method'. The chiaroscuro effects of this process were a lasting influence on Phillips's style. In 1790 he moved to London to study at the Royal Academy and simultaneously assisted in Benjamin West's studio. He exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1794 to 1844 and was elected ARA in 1804, RA in 1808 and Professor of Painting in succession to Henry Fuseli from 1825 to 1832.
Lilly martin spencer
1822-1902 American painter of English birth. At the age of eight, she and her family emigrated to America, and after three years in New York they moved to Marietta, OH. In 1841 her father took her to Cincinnati, where she exhibited and received help from artists such as the animal painter James Henry Beard (1812-93). However, she refused the offer of the city's most important art patron, Nicholas Longworth, to assist in her art studies in Boston and Europe. Instead she stayed in Cincinnati and married an Englishman, Benjamin Spencer, by whom she had thirteen children, seven living to maturity.