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 :. | Portrait of Uvedale Tomkins Price | Portrait of Charles Wolfran Cornwall | Woman in Blue | Lady in Blue | Landscap with Peasant and Horses |
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Artur Grottger
(1837 - 1867) was a Polish painter and graphic designer, one of the most prominent artists of the early 1800s despite his brief life. He was born in Eastern Galicia to an amateur artist of German background, Jan Jozef Grottger, and a Polish mother. Grottger studied painting under the apprenticeships of Jan Kanty Maszkowski and Juliusz Kossak in Lwew. Grottger received an imperial scholarship to attend the Krakow School of Fine Arts, where he studied under Władysław Łuszczkiewicz and Wojciech Kornel Stattler. Around this time he met one of his biggest future art patrons and benefactors, Aleksander Pappenheim. Grottger painted mostly epic battle scenes. He moved to Vienna in 1854, where he produced some of his most famous paintings. In 1865, Grottger returned to Poland and stayed in Krakew and Lwew, but left this time for good in 1866.
Henry Bacon
1839-1922 Henry Bacon Gallery Henry Bacon was born in Watseka, Illinois to father civil engineer Henry Bacon and mother Elizabeth Kelton Bacon, both of Massachusetts. Bacon was largely raised in Wilmington, N.C., where his father settled down and served as a government engineer in charge of the Cape Fear River improvements. At age 15, Henry Bacon was sent north to Boston's Chauncey Hall School. In 1884 he matriculated at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, but left within a year to launch an architectural career in the office of Chamberlin & Whidden in Boston as a draftsman. Bacon was soon hired into the office of famed McKim, Mead & White in New York City, the best-known American architectural firm of its time. While at McKim, Mead & White (MMW), Bacon won, in 1889, the Rotch Traveling Scholarship for architectural students, which gave him two years of study and travel in Europe, learning and drawing details of Roman and Greek architecture as far afield as Turkey, where he met his future wife, Laura Florence Calvert, daughter of a British Consul. He traveled with another fellowship student, Albert Kahn who would become a leading industrial architect. Returning to the U.S. he spent a few more years with his mentor, McKim, working on projects like the Rhode Island State House in Providence, Rhode Island, and serving as McKim's personal representative in Chicago during the World's Fair in Chicago, where MMW was at work designing certain buildings for the World's Fair. In 1897, Bacon left the office of McKim, Mead & White (MMW) to found, with a younger MMW architect James Brite, a new partnership Brite and Bacon Architects, where Brite was in charge of financial, administrative, and contracting aspects of the partnership, while Henry Bacon was in charge of the architectural design and construction. The partnership immediately won the competition for the Jersey City Public Library, the Hall of History for the American University at Washington, DC, and thereafter built a good number of public buildings and a small number of private residences. The partnership was selected to build two private residences in 1897, the "La Fetra Mansion" in Summit, New Jersey, and a three-story Georgian mansion "Laurel Hill" in Columbia, NC. The "La Fetra Mansion" was completed by the partnership sometime during 1899 to 1900, and published in the September 1901 issue of The Architecture, the pre-eminent architectural professional journal of its time. The LeFetra Mansion fully exhibits Bacon's Greek and Roman architectural predilections, his simple, austere, elegant lines, and his skill in dimensions and proportions that give rise to a feeling of the presence of divine spirituality, peaceful tranquility, and a sense of divine protection. While the La Fetra Mansion in Summit, NJ bears Bacon's signature style, the Georgian Mansion "Laurel Hill" was most probably designed by Brite.
camille saint
Period: Post-Romantic (1870-1909) Country: France Born: October 09, 1835 in Paris, France Died: December 16, 1921 in Algiers, Algeria Genres: Chamber Music, Choral Music, Concerto, Keyboard Music, Miscellaneous Music, Opera, Orchestral Music, Symphony