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 :. | Seashore with Fishermen | Landscape with Peasant and Horses | Portrait of Jonathan Buttall | Children Building Houses with Cards | Portrait of Elizabeth and Charles Bedford |
Related Artists:
Peter Jakob Horemans
painted Portrait of Clemens August as Falconer in 18th century
Wyatt Eaton
(May 6, 1849 - June 7, 1896) was an Canadian/American portrait and figure painter, remembered as one of the founders of the Society of American Artists. Born in Philipsburg, Quebec, Lower Canada, Eaton was a student of the National Academy of Design, New York. In 1872, he moved to Paris and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts under Jean-Leon Gerôme. During this time, he made the acquaintance of Jean-François Millet at Barbizon, and was also influenced by his friend Jules Bastien-Lepage. After his return to the United States in 1877, he became a teacher in the Cooper Institute, and opened a studio in New York City. He became one of the founders of the Society of American Artists, in which he was the first secretary. Eaton died from tuberculosis at Newport, Rhode Island on June 7, 1896.
BOLLONGIER, Hans
Dutch painter, Haarlem school (b. ca. 1600, Haarlem, d. ca. 1675, Haarlem) Hans Gillisz. Bollongier or Boulenger (Haarlem, 1600-idem, 1645) was a still life Dutch painter.