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 :. | Lavenham Church from the South | Cornard Wood,Near Sudbury,Suffolk | Portrait of a Girl and Boy | john campbell ,4th duke of argyll | Lady and Gentleman in a Landscape |
Related Artists:
Giuseppe Vermiglio
Giuseppe Vermiglio (c.1585 - c.1635) was a Caravaggist painter from Northern Italy, active also in Rome. Our knowledge of Vermiglioes life is sketchy. It is probable that he was born in Alessandria. He spent the first two decades of the seventeenth century in Rome where, while training and working as an artist, he adopted a bohemian lifestyle with a tendency to become involved in painterly brawling: in 1604 he supported his master Adriano di Monteleonees account of a dispute with two unknown artists which had led to Monteleone being wounded by his own wife; the following year Vermiglio was arrested and imprisoned after being discovered at the Monte di Brianza hostellry bearing an unlicensed sword; and in 1611 proceedings were brought against him for physically attacking the painter Silvio Oliviero. In 1618, still in Rome, he is recorded as a picture dealer. Around 1620 he returned to northern Italy where he pursued his career as a painter in Piedmont (Novara and Alessandria) and in Lombardy (notably in Mantua and Milan). His art was profoundly influenced by Caravaggio. Other painters to whom his work is thought, on the basis of stylistic references, to be indebted include the Bolognese Annibale Carracci and Guido Reni; it has been suggested that Vermiglio worked or studied in Bologna at some point. Luigi Lanzi acclaimed the painting of Daniel among the lions, in the library of the Passione in Milan, as his masterwork. Judgments of quality of his work have ranged from Alfred Moires inconsequential craftsmane to Lanzies the best painter in oils of which the ancient state of Piedmont could boast, and one of the best Italian artists of his times.
Kristian Zahrtmann
(31 March 1843 - 22 June 1917) was a Danish painter. He was a part of the Danish artistic generation in the late 19th century, along with Peder Severin Krøyer and Theodor Esbern Philipsen, who broke away from both the strictures of traditional Academicism and the heritage of the Golden Age of Danish Painting, in favor of naturalism and realism. He was known especially for his history paintings, and especially those depicting strong, tragic, legendary women in Danish history. He also produced works of many other genres including landscapes, street scenes, folk scenes and portraits. He had a far-reaching effect on the development of Danish art through his effective support of individual style among his students during the many years he taught, and by his pioneering use of color.
Johann Martin Stock
(1742 - 1800) Budapest, Magyar Nemzeti Galeria