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 :. | Details of The mall in St.James's Park | Portrait of Giovanna Baccelli | Portrait of Johann Christian Bach | Mrs.Peter william baker | A Cottage Girl with Dog and Pitcher |
Related Artists:
Joseph Stieler
German Painter, 1781-1858,German painter. In 1798 he studied under Christoph Fesel (1737-1805) in Werzburg and in 1800 with Heinrich Feger in Vienna, where his style was strongly influenced by English portraiture. After he studied in Paris (1807-8) with Fran?ois G?rard the influence of Neo-classicism became apparent in his work. He visited Italy in 1809, 1810 and 1812 to do commissioned portraits for various patrons, among them Prince Eugene de Beauharnais (1809; Munich, Bayer. Nmus.) and Joachim Murat, King of Naples (reg 1808-15). In 1812 he went to Munich where he did work for middle-class clients, the nobility and the royal family of Bavaria (e.g. the portrait of Maximilian I Joseph, 1816; Ellingen, Schloss). In 1820 he was appointed court painter to Ludwig I, King of Bavaria (reg 1825-48), and painted several portraits of him. In 1823 he helped co-found the Kunstverein in Munich. He was one of the most important portrait painters in the Neo-classical style, specializing particularly in studies of women, as seen in the 36 portraits commissioned by Ludwig I for the Schenheitsgalerie (1827-42; Munich, Schloss Nymphenburg). In his portraits for the middle classes and for the court he devised certain peculiarities of form. He painted various members of the royal houses of Austria, Prussia and Sweden, as well as members of the nobility in the duchies of Saxe-Altenberg, Saxe-Coburg and Hesse. His sitters also included some of the most important figures in the political and intellectual life of Germany in the first half of the 19th century. He painted the pendant portraits of Franz Brentano and Antonie Brentano (both 1808; Winkel, Brentanohaus), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1828; Munich, Neue Pin.) and Ludwig Tieck (1838; Berlin, Schloss Charlottenburg), the geographer and botanist Alexander von Humboldt (1843; Potsdam, Schloss Charlottenhof) and the musician Ludwig van Beethoven (Bonn, Beethoven-Haus). After 1845 the classical elements in his paintings were sometimes combined with an application of colour typical of plein-air studies. He also painted genre pictures and religious scenes.
Juan de Flandes
Flemish-born Spanish Northern Renaissance Painter, ca.1460-1519 South Netherlandish painter, active in Spain. Nothing is known of his life or work before he went to Spain, where he is first mentioned in a document of 1496 as Juan de Flandes, a painter in the service of Queen Isabella of Castile. Treasury accounts confirm that he held this position until the Queen death in 1504. On arriving in Spain, he must have lived in Burgos, where he certainly met MICHEL SITTOW, another painter in the Queen service, who had been at the Castilian court since 1492.
Francisco de goya y Lucientes
b. March 30, 1746, Fuendetodos, Spain--d. April 16, 1828, Goya is considered the 18th Century's foremost painter and etcher of Spanish culture, known for his realistic scenes of battles, bullfights and human corruption. Goya lived during a time of upheaval in Spain that included war with France, the Inquisition, the rule of Napoleon's brother, Joseph, as the King of Spain and, finally, the reign of the Spanish King Ferdinand VII. Experts proclaim these events -- and Goya's deafness as a result of an illness in 1793 -- as central to understanding Goya's work, which frequently depicts human misery in a satiric and sometimes nightmarish fashion. From the 1770s he was a royal court painter for Charles III and Charles IV, and when Bonaparte took the throne in 1809, Goya swore fealty to the new king. When the crown was restored to Spain's Ferdinand VII (1814), Goya, in spite of his earlier allegiance to the French king, was reinstated as royal painter. After 1824 he lived in self-imposed exile in Bordeaux until his death, reportedly because of political differences with Ferdinand. Over his long career he created hundreds of paintings, etchings, and lithographs, among them Maya Clothed and Maya Nude (1798-1800); Caprichos (1799-82); The Second of May 1808 and The Third of May 1808 (1814); Disasters of War (1810-20); and The Black Paintings (1820-23).