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 :. | Diana and Actaeon (mk25) | Mr and Mrs Andrews | Miss Anne Ford (mk08) | Portrait of Ann Ford | Conversation in the Park |
Related Artists:
gerard terborch
Gerard ter Borch (or Terburg) (December 1617 ?C 8 December 1681) was a Dutch genre painter, who lived in the Dutch Golden Age. Gerard ter Borch was born in December 1617 in Zwolle in the province of Overijssel in the Dutch Republic. He received an excellent education from his father, also an artist, and developed his talent very early. The inscription on a study of a head proves that Ter Borch was at Amsterdam in 1632, where he studied possibly under Willem Cornelisz Duyster or Pieter Codde. Duyster's influence can be traced in a picture bearing the date 1638, in the lonides Bequest (Victoria and Albert Museum). In 1634 he studied under Pieter de Molijn in Haarlem. A record of this Haarlem period is the Consultation (1635) at the Berlin Gallery. In 1635 he was in London, and subsequently he travelled in Germany, France, Spain and Italy. It is certain that he was in Rome in 1641, when he painted the small portraits on copper of Jan Six and A Young Lady (Six Collection, Amsterdam). In 1648 he was at M??nster during the meeting of the congress which ratified the treaty of peace between the Spaniards and the Dutch, and executed his celebrated little picture, painted upon copper, of the assembled plenipotentiaries--a work which, along with the a portrait of a Man Standing, now represents the master in the national collection in London. The picture was bought by the marquess of Hertford at the Demidoff sale for 1280, and presented to the National Gallery by Sir Richard Wallace, at the suggestion of his secretary, Sir John Murray Scott. At this time Ter Borch was invited to visit Madrid, where he received employment and the honour of knighthood from Philip IV, but, in consequence of an intrigue, it is said, he was obliged to return to the Netherlands. He seems to have resided for a time in Haarlem; but he finally settled in Deventer, where he became a member of the town council, as which he appears in the portrait now in the gallery of the Hague. He died at Deventer in 1681. Ter Borch is excellent as a portrait painter, but still greater as a painter of genre subjects. He depicts with admirable truth the life of the wealthy and cultured classes of his time, and his work is free from any touch of the grossness which finds so large a place in Dutch art.[not specific enough to verify] His figures are well drawn and expressive in attitude; his colouring is clear and rich, but his best skill lies in his unequalled rendering of texture in draperies, which is seen to advantage in such pictures as The Letter and in The Gallant Conversation engraved by Wille ?C which exists in various repetitions at Berlin and Amsterdam, and in the Bridgewater Gallery. Ter Borch's works are comparatively rare; only about eighty have been catalogued. Six of these are at the Hermitage, six at the Berlin Museum, five at the Louvre; four at the Dresden Museum, and two at the Wallace Collection. The artist's painting The Suitor's Visit, c. 1658, oil on canvas, 80 x 75 cm (31½ ?? 29 9/16 in.) in the Andrew W. Mellon Collection, was used on the cover of Marilyn Stokstad's second edition of Art History
Jean-Baptiste Santerre
French Baroque Era Painter, 1651-1717 The 12th child of a merchant, he was apprenticed to the portrait painter Jean Lemaire before entering the busy studio of the history painter Bon Boullogne. Although he executed some history paintings, he began to specialize in portraiture early in his career. The Portrait of Two Actresses (1699; St Petersburg, Hermitage), clearly influenced by Fran?ois de Troy, shows Santerre's interest in the well-known portrait painters of his time. Nevertheless, he was among the first painters in France to absorb the influence of Rembrandt, as in Young Girl at a Window (Orl?ans, Mus. B.-A.; after Rembrandt, London, Dulwich Pict. Gal.). In such portraits as Girl with a Veil
Thomas Guest
British artist 1754-1818