Thomas Gainsborough
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 :. | Two Daughters with a Cat | An Unknown Couple in a Landscape | Self-portrait with and Daughter | Mary, Countess Howe | Lavenham Church from the South | Related Artists: Jean - Baptiste CarpeauxFrench Realist Sculptor, 1827-1875.
French Realist Sculptor, 1827-1875.French sculptor, painter, draughtsman and etcher. He was one of the leading sculptors of the Second Empire (1852-70) in France. Robert Swain Gifford(December 23, 1840 - January 13, 1905) was an American landscape painter. He was influenced by the Barbizon school.
Much of his work focuses on the landscapes of New England, where he was born. He, along with Victorian contemporaries from the White Mountain and Hudson River Schools, helped immortalize the majestic cliffs of Grand Manan in the Bay of Fundy. His painting from the island, "Pettes Cove," is illustrative of his masterful marine work.
In the 1870s, he undertook several journeys to Europe and the Middle East and painted some subjects from those regions. In 1899, he was an artist on the famous Harriman Alaska Expedition.
Some of his works hang in the most prominent galleries in the USA, including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC. He was a member of the Society of American Artists.
Knut Ekwall was a Swedish painter, 3 April 1843 in Säby (Småland province), Sweden - 4 April 1912 in Säby.
Ekwall studied from 1860-1866 at the Academy of Arts in Stockholm, with emphasis on xylography (designing woodcut printing blocks) and drawing.
He became a pupil of the painter Ludwig Knaus in Berlin.
In 1870, Ekwall established himself as an artist in Munich in Germany and later worked in Leipzig.
His works during this period were primarily for magazine illustrations, and were reproduced as engravings.
He returned to Sweden and died there at the age of 69.
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