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 :. | Ritratto di Giovane | Cornard Wood,Near Sudbury,Suffolk | River Landscape | Portrait of Sarah Kirby and John Joshua Kirby | conversation in a park, c. |
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Jacopo Ligozzi
(1547 - 1627) was an Italian painter, illustrator, designer, and miniaturist of the late Renaissance and early Mannerist styles. Born in Verona, he was the son of the artist Giovanni Ermano Ligozzi, and part of a large family of painters and artisans. After a time in the Habsburg court in Vienna where he displayed drawings of animal and botanical specimens, he was invited to come to Florence, receiving the patronage of the Medici as one of the court artists. Upon the death of Giorgio Vasari in 1574, he became head of the Accademia e Compagnia delle Arti del Disegno, the officially patronized guild of artists, which was often called to advise on diverse projects. He served Francesco I, Ferdinando I, Cosimo II and Ferdinando II, Grand Dukes of Tuscany. He worked on some projects with Bernardino Poccetti. Late in life, he was named director of the grand-ducal Galleria dei Lavori, a workshop providing designs for artworks made mainly for export: embroidered textiles and for the newly popular medium of pietre dure, mosaics of semiprecious stones and colored marbles. Jacopo Ligozzi was born at Verona c. 1543, He died after 1632. He painted some frescoes for the cloister of the Ognissanti. He painted for Santa Maria Novella a canvas of St. Raymond resuscitating a Child and a Martyrdom of St. Dorothea for the church of the Conventuali at Pescia. Both Agostino Carracci and Andrea Andreani engraved some of his works
Theodore Butler
1861-1936
Arthur streeton
1867 - 1943 Australian painter. He moved to Melbourne with his family when he was seven. In 1882 he enrolled as a student of drawing at the evening classes of the National Gallery School of Design and briefly in the School of Painting, but he had no sustained formal instruction in painting. At the same time he began making watercolour sketches of Melbourne, and by 1886 his skill led to an apprenticeship as a lithographer to George Troedel and Co. of Collins Street. The most important early influence on Streeton was Tom Roberts, who had returned to Melbourne from Europe in 1885. With Frederick McCubbin, Streeton and Roberts painted en plein air at a temporary camp at Box Hill, forming what became known as the HEIDELBERG SCHOOL. A little later Streeton established the first permanent artists' camp at Eaglemont, north-west of Melbourne, overlooking the Yarra Valley, where he painted some of his most memorable works. 'Still glides the stream and shall forever glide'