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 :. | mr.and mrs.andrews | The Artist Daughters, Molly and Peggy | Portrait of a Young Woman | conversation in a park, c. | The Painter's Daughters Chasing a Butterfly |
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Vladimir Baranov-Rossine
(1888?C1944) was a Russian-Ukrainian painter, avant-garde artist (Cubo-Futurist), and inventor of Jewish ethnicity Vladimir Baranov-Rossine was born in Kherson, Ukraine, to parents of Jewish ethnicity. In 1902 he studied at the School of the Society for the Furthering of the Arts in St. Petersburg. From 1903 to 1907 he attended the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg. In 1908 he exhibited with the group Zveno ("The Link") in Kiev organized by the artist David Burliuk and his brother Wladimir Burliuk. In 1910 he moved to Paris, wher until 1914 he was a resident in the artist's colony La Ruche together with Alexander Archipenko, Sonia Delaunay-Terk, Nathan Altman and others. He exhibited regularly in Paris after 1911. He returned to Russia in 1914. In 1916 he had a solo exhibition in Oslo. In 1918 he had exhibits with the union of artists Mir Iskusstva ("World of Art") in Petrograd (St.Petersburg). In the same year he had an exhibition with the group Jewish Society for the Furthering of the Arts in Moscow, together with Nathan Altman, El Lissitzky and David Shterenberg. He participated at the First State Free Art Exhibition in Petrograd in 1919. In 1922 Baranov-Rossine was the teacher at the Higher Artistic-Technical Workshops (VKhUTEMAS) in Moscow. In 1924 he had the first presentation of his optophonic piano during a performance at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow - a synaesthetic instrument that was capable of creating sounds and coloured lights, patterns and textures simultaneously.
Hamilton Easter Field
(1873-1922) was an important American artist, teacher, author, critic, collector and patron of the arts