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 :. | john campbell ,4th duke of argyll | Sarah Siddons | Portrait of James Christie | Gainsborough Daughter Mary | Mr and Mrs William Hallett |
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TERBORCH, Gerard
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1617-1681 Dutch genre and portrait painter. He studied with his father and traveled throughout Europe, showing extraordinary precocity in his early work. In 1648 he attended the congress at Menster and painted portraits of the delegates that he incorporated in his celebrated group, The Peace of Menster (National Gall., London). Soon after, he was invited to Spain, where he worked for Philip IV. On returning to Holland in 1650 he painted a variety of genre scenes, capturing the individuality of each subject and portraying the life and customs of the wealthy burgher class with rare dignity and distinction. The tiny portraits and the interiors that were his specialty are painted with elegance, serenity, and a technique of consummate craftsmanship. Among his most famous pictures are Self-Portrait and The Toilet (The Hague), and The Guitar Lesson (National Gall., London).
ANSALDO, G Andrea
Italian painter, Genoese school (b. 1584, Voltri, d. 1638, Genova)
marc-aurele de foy suzor-cote
Canadian Painter, 1869-1937 was a Canadian painter and sculptor. He was born in Arthabaska, Quebec in 1869. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris with L??on Bonnat during the 1890s. After his return to Quebec in 1908, he produced many impressionist paintings of the Quebec landscape, as well as portraits, nudes, historical paintings and later sculptures.