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 | Ritratto di Giovane | Sarah,Lady innes | Portrait of Revd Tobias Rustat | Woman in Blue |
Related Artists:
anthonis van dyck
Flemish painter and draughtsman, active also in Italy and England. He was the leading Flemish painter after Rubens in the first half of the 17th century and in the 18th century was often considered no less than his match. A number of van Dyck's studies in oil of characterful heads were included in Rubens's estate inventory in 1640, where they were distinguished neither in quality nor in purpose from those stocked by the older master. Although frustrated as a designer of tapestry and, with an almost solitary exception, as a deviser of palatial decoration, van Dyck succeeded brilliantly as an etcher. He was also skilled at organizing reproductive engravers in Antwerp to publish his works, in particular The Iconography (c. 1632-44), comprising scores of contemporary etched and engraved portraits, eventually numbering 100, by which election he revived the Renaissance tradition of promoting images of uomini illustri. His fame as a portrait painter in the cities of the southern Netherlands, as well as in London, Genoa, Rome and Palermo, has never been outshone; and from at least the early 18th century his full-length portraits were especially prized in Genoese, British and Flemish houses, where they were appreciated as much for their own sake as for the identities and families of the sitters.
Creator:Edmond Dyonnet
He was born on 25 June 1859 in Crest (Drôme), France, from the marriage of Ulysses-Alexandre Dyonnet, industrialist, and Goullioud Albine. The real family name is Guyonnet de Pivat but due to an error of births during the French Revolution, the surname became Dyonnet. Edmond died in Montreal on 7 July 1954, at age 95. He was buried with his family in the cemetery of Notre-Dame-des-Neiges, in Montreal. Edmond had two younger sisters, Emma Dyonnet, wife Lorin (1866-1947) and Clemence Dyonnet, wife Chabot (18? -1905). Ulysses, the father of Edmond, had an older brother Leon Dyonnet Goullioud who married Helen, the sister of Albine. Leon Dyonnet made a fortune in corsets for women in association with Amyot from 1886 to 1891 and set up the Dominion Corset company, rue de la Couronne in Quebec City. The couple had a daughter artist, cousin of Edmond Dyonnet: Eugenie Dyonnet, who immigrated to Canada in 1872 and died in 1875 in Montreal. Edmond Dyonnet was born in Drôme in 1859, and at 9 years old, he followed his father and migrated to Italy, he continued his primary education in Turin, from 1868 to 1873, in municipal schools and then returned to France with his family in the Drôme. He studies at Crest high school from 1873 to 1875. His father Ulysses met in Paris the brother of Judge George Baby who convinced him to emigrate to Quebec.
Bertha Worms
painted Missing Naples in 1895