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 Harvest Wagon | Portrait of Uvedale Tomkins Price | Portrait of Johann Christian Bach | Mr.and Mrs.William Hallett | The Charterhouse, |
Related Artists:
Frederic Auguste Bartholdi
French Sculptor, 1834-1904,was a French sculptor. He is also known as Amilcar Hasenfratz, a pseudonym used for his paintings of Egyptian subjects, apparently because of concern that his work in another medium would distract from his sculpture. Born in Colmar, Alsace, Bartholdi went to Paris to further his studies in architecture as well as painting. Then he made a long trip to Egypt and Yemen, where he heard about the Suez project. He came back to his native city to become an architect. Bartholdi was a freemason, he was initiated on October 14, 1875 in the lodge LeAlsace-Lorraine, Grand Orient of France.
Gustav Graef
(December 14, 1821 in Königsberg - January 6, 1895 in Berlin) was a German painter, primarily of portraits and historical subjects. He studied with Theodor Hildebrandt and Friedrich Wilhelm Schadow at the Kunstakademie Desseldorf. His son Botho Graef became an art historian of some note, and his daughter was the painter Sabine Lepsius.
Hans Bol
(1534 - 1593), Flemish artist, received his early training from his two uncles who were also painters. He then was the apprentice to a Mechelen watercolorist and tempera painter at the age of fourteen. Because Boles watercolors became so widely reproduced, he began creating miniatures on parchment. The technique earned him many international clients and a good income. In addition, Bol also produced several oil paintings, illuminated manuscripts, drawings, and engravings. He preferred to create landscapes, mythological, allegorical and biblical scenes, and genre paintings. Bol was a mannerist, which followed the High Renaissance. One of his most famous works of art is Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, made with watercolours on paper. It was inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses, in which the ancient myth of Icarus is told. The painting is a marvelous example of the art of landscape. Subtle colour transitions, skilful perspective and effective contrasts between foreground and background, and human figures and the forces of nature, lend this miniature painting a cosmic dimension. Bol chose the Icarus theme on several occasions. It was also subject of one of his paintings, which described in detail and highly praised by Karel van Mander in the 17th century. Although Bol was once an important and admired painter, we only know him through his small drawings and watercolours. Most of his paintings appear to have been lost. This miniature is all the more important, because it probably produces the painting referret to by Van Mander, which may have been his masterpiece. Consequently, Bol ought to be viewed not only as a superior miniature painter, but above all as an important artist who played a key role in the development of landscape art.