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 :. | Robert Andrews and his Wife Frances (mk08) | The Marsham Children | Portrait of the Artist's Daughters | Mr and Mrs William Hallett | Self-portrait |
Related Artists:
Sir Augustus Wall Callcott
1779-1844
Egedius, Halfdan
1877-1899,Norwegian painter and illustrator. His artistic education began at the age of nine, when he enrolled at the school of art of Knud Bergslien (1827-1908) in Kristiania, where he was a pupil from 1886 to 1889. Even from this early period his painted studies and drawings, for instance of his sister Signe and brother Carl (both 1887; Oslo, N.G.), reveal striking maturity. In 1891 he was a pupil of Erik Werenskiold and from 1891 to 1892 he studied at the Arts and Crafts School in Kristiania. Egedius discovered his strongest impetus and greatest inspiration, however, on his first visit to Telemark in south-west Norway in summer 1892. The artist Torleif Stadskleiv (1865-1946), whom he met there and who became his closest friend, endeared the region to Egedius with stories of its traditions and people. In 1894 Egedius studied for a short period under Harriet Backer, and he made his d?but at the Kristiania Autumn Exhibition in 1894 with the painting Saturday Evening (Oslo, N.G.), painted in Telemark the previous year, which won high praise. In this landscape the atmosphere of the summer night is rendered with a lyrical use of colour and soft brushstrokes. Egedius spent the summer of 1894 in the inspiring and instructive company of a group of artists at V?g? in the Gudbrands Valley in north-west Norway, but for the summer of 1895 he was again in Telemark. Since his previous stay there he had matured artistically and his work now revealed a new confidence and boldness. The most notable paintings from 1895 are 'Juvrestolen' in Telemark, The Dreamer, Girls Dancing and the magnificent portrait of Mari Clasen (all Oslo, N.G.). He also began work on Music and Dance (Oslo, N.G., see fig.), which he continued the following year.
Berkes Antal
(1874-1938) was a Hungarian painter, born in Budapest, Hungary. Lived in Paris for some time and produced cityscapes there as well as similar street scenes of Budapest and Vienna. He studied at The Academy of Fine Arts between 1889-1894 in Budapest, Hungary. He first started painting landscapes, and later changed to painting street scenes of Budapest. His popularity and sales increased so he started "mass producing" many of his works, meeting the requirements of the art dealers of his age. His work went through light and dark periods as he experimented with light.