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 :. | The Painter Daughters Chasing a Butterfly | A Coastal Landscape | Portrait of Carl Friedrich Abel | mr.and mrs.andrews | Portrait of Lady Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire |
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Lorenzo Costa
Bologna 1460-Mantua 1535 was an Italian painter of the Renaissance. He was born at Ferrara, but moved to Bologna by the his early twenties, and would be more influential to the Bolognese school of painting. However, many artists worked in both nearby cities, and thus others consider him a product of the School of Ferrara. There are claims that he trained with Cosimo Tura. In 1483 he painted his famous Madonna and Child with the Bentivoglio family, and other frescoes, on the walls of the Bentivoglio chapel in San Giacomo Maggiore, and he followed this with many other works. He was a great friend of Francesco Francia, who was much influenced by him. In 1509 he went to Mantua, where his patron was the Marquis Francesco Gonzaga, and he eventually died there. His Madonna and Child enthroned is in the National Gallery, London, but his chief works are at Bologna. His sons, Ippolito and Girolamo, were also painters, and so was Girolamo's son, Lorenzo the younger (1537-1583).
MEULEN, Adam Frans van der
Flemish painter (b. 1632, Bruxelles, d. 1690, Paris). Flemish painter and draughtsman, active also in France. He was the eldest son of the seven children of Pieter van der Meulen and his second wife Marie van Steen Wegen. He went to study with Pieter Snayers, court painter in Brussels, on 18 May 1646, and in 1651 he became a master in the Brussels painters' guild. Probably soon after he married Catherina Huseweel. During the first 15 years of his career, the so-called Brussels period, he painted small-scale genre and history scenes with political and military events in the Baroque style of Sebastiaen Vrancx, Pieter Snayers and Jan Breughel the elder. Typical examples are a Cavalry Battle (1653; Geneva, Mus. A. & Hist.), a Ceremonial Entry into Brussels (1659; Kassel, Gemeldegal.), a General on Campaign (1660; Madrid, Prado) and a Hunting Scene
Frederick Morgan
English Painter 1856-1927