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 :. | Portrait of Edward Ligonier | Mr. and Mr.s Andrews | Detail of Portrait of Mr and Mrs Andrews | mr.and mrs.andrews | Landscap with Peasant and Horses |
Related Artists:
Joseph Heintz
1564-1609 Swiss Painter, draughtsman, architect and artistic adviser, son of Daniel Heintz. He began his training as a painter c. 1579 with Hans Bock I (c. 1550-c. 1623) in Basle. His first surviving drawings (1580) show something akin to Holbein manner in his stained-glass window designs. After completing his apprenticeship he went c. 1584 to Rome, where he studied the works of antiquity, and those of Raphael, Michelangelo, Polidoro da Caravaggio and others. In 1587 he went via Florence to Venice, absorbing the works of Tintoretto, Titian and Veronese. In autumn 1591 the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II summoned him as portraitist and court painter to Prague but soon sent him back to Italy, where he drew ancient statues in addition to producing his own work and acting as art agent for the Emperor. In 1592-5 he stayed mainly in Rome, then returned to Prague. In the following years he worked indefatigably as a draughtsman, painter, architect and artistic adviser, moving between Augsburg and Prague.
george grosz
george grosz(1893 to 1959),German painter, draughtsman and illustrator. He is particularly valued for his caustic caricatures, in which he used the reed pen with notable success. Although his paintings are not quite as significant as his graphic art, a number of them are, nonetheless, major works. He grew up in the provincial town of Stolp, Pomerania (now Slupsk, Poland), where he attended the Oberrealschule, until he was expelled for disobedience. From 1909 to 1911 he attended the Akademie der K?nste in Dresden, where he met Kurt G?nther, Bernhard Kretschmar (1889-1972) and Franz Lenk (b 1898). Under his teacher Richard M?ller (1874-1954), Grosz painted and drew from plaster casts. At this time he was unaware of such avant-garde movements as Die Br?cke, also active in Dresden. In 1912 he studied with Emil Orlik at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Berlin. A year later he moved to the Acad?mie Colarossi in Paris, where he learnt a free drawing style that swiftly reached the essence of a motif.
Francis Holman
(1729-1784) was a British maritime painter, little recognised during his own lifetime, but whose paintings are now sought aftereHe is also notable as the teacher of Thomas Luny. He was born in Ramsgate and baptized on 14 November 1729 at St Laurence-in-Thanet, Ramsgate.[1] He was the eldest son and second of six children of Francis Holman (1696-1739), and his wife, Anne Long (1707-1757). His father was a master mariner, and his grandfather a Ramsgate cooper. His younger brother, Captain John Holman (1733-1816), maintained the family shipping business and remained close to Francis throughout his life. Young Francis would certainly have been immersed in the maritime world during his up-bringing; the legacy of this early knowledge is a wealth of detail and accuracy in his later work. The moonlight Battle of Cape St Vincent, 16 January 1780 by Francis Holman, painted 1780 A sixth-rate British man of war off Dover, by Francis Holman, 1777 A small shipyard on the Thames, by Francis Holman, between 1760 and 1784Francis Holman lived in at least five addresses in Wapping on the Thames in London. He married, firstly, Elizabeth, and they produced 3 sons; John (b. 1757), and two more sons, both named Francis, who died in infancy. Elizabeth's death is unrecorded, but on 7 May 1781 he married, secondly, Jane Maxted (c.1736-1790). He was apparently childless when he wrote his will in 1783.