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 :. | Mrs.Siddons | Portrait of Johann Christian Fischer | An Extensive River Landscape with Cattle and a Drover and Sailing Boats in the distance | Portrait of a Woman | Detail of Portrait of Mr and Mrs Andrews |
Related Artists:
Frans Wilhelm Odelmark
painted Canale Grande - Venice in 1849-1937
BASSETTI, Marcantonio
Italian painter, Veronese school (b. 1588, Verona, d. 1630, Verona) Italian painter. He was a pupil of Felice Brusasorci (Ridolfi), but he soon moved to Venice, where he studied the art of Jacopo Tintoretto in particular, but also that of Jacopo Bassano and of Veronese, whose works he copied in chiaroscuro drawings (mainly Windsor Castle, Royal Lib.) similar to those of Domenico Tintoretto. Bassetti's early painted Portrait of a Man with a Glove (Verona, Castelvecchio) is essentially Venetian, close to the art of Bassano.
Juan de Valdes Leal
Seville 1622-1690 was a Spanish painter of the Baroque era. He was born at Seville in 1622, and distinguished himself as a painter, sculptor, and architect. He worked for a time under Antonio del Castillo. Among his works are a History of the Prophet Elias for the church of the Carmelites; a Martyrdom of St. Andrew for the church of San Francesco at Cerdoba; and a Triumph of the Cross for la Caridad at Seville. He was one of the founders of the Seville Academy along with his friend, Bartolome Esteban Murillo. He died at Seville. His wife (daughter of Antonio Palomino), Isabella Carasquilla, was also a painter. She died at Seville as late as 1730. Their children were artists, including Lucas, Juan, Maria, and Laura de Valdes. His daughters specialized in portrait miniatures.