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 Fallen Tree | The Painter's Daughters Chasing a Butterfly | Countess Howe | Portrait of Ann Ford | Man in a Wood with a Dog |
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CAMASSEI, Andrea
Italian painter, Roman school (b. 1602, Bevagna, d. 1649, Roma) Andrea Camassei (1602-1649) was an Italian painter of the Baroque, who was mainly active in Rome under the patronage of the Barberini. He was born in Bevagna. He was active in painting in the Palazzo Barberini as well as in Antonio Barberini's favored church, Santa Maria della Concezione, where he painted the Assumption of the Virgin on the dome. His training was under Domenichino, but he also labored under the direction of Sacchi and Pietro da Cortona. He painted a Triumph of Constantine for the Baptistery of the Lateran Palace. He painted for the Taddeo Barberini, two large canvases (1638-39) depicting Massacre of the Niobids and Hunt of Diana. He also painted a Saints Bonaventura, Bernardino & Ludovico da Tolosa for Santa Caterina in Rapecchiano (Spello).
COXCIE, Raphael
Flemish painter (b. 1540, Mechelen, d. 1616, Brussels).
Fyodor Rokotov
(1736 - 1809) was a distinguished Russian painter who specialized in portraits. Fyodor Rokotov was born into a family of peasant serfs, belonging to the Repnins. Much in his biography is obscure. He studied art in Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts. After buying back his freedom in the end of 1750s he became established as a fashionable painter. In 1765, Rokotov was elected an Academician, but he did not work as a professor in the Academy long, because it interfered with his painting. He returned to Moscow in 1765, where he lived for the rest of his life. He had a lot of commissions there, becoming one of the best portrait painters of his time. Among his best-known portraits are Portrait of Alexandra Struyskaya (1772), sometimes called the Russian Mona Lisa and admittedly the most celebrated piece of the 18th-century Russian painting; Portrait of Countess Elisabeth Santi (1785), and Lady in a Pink Dress.