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 :. | Detail of Portrait of Mr and Mrs Andrews | Portrait of William Wollaston | Portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire | Portrait of Mr and Mrs Carter of Bullingdon House | Woman in Blue |
Related Artists:
Marianne von Werefkin
Marianne von Werefkin (Russian, 10 September 1860, Tula, Russia - 6 February 1938, Ascona, Switzerland), born Marianna Wladimirowna Werewkina (transliteration Marianna Vladimirovna Verevkina), was a Russian-Swiss Expressionist painter. Marianne von Werefkin was born the daughter of the commander of the Ekaterinaburg Regiment. In 1880, she became a student of Ilya Repin, the most important painter of Russian Realism. Her progress was dealt a setback by a hunting accident in 1888 in which she shot her right hand, the one with which she painted. In 1892 she met Alexej von Jawlensky, who desired to be her protege, and in 1896 she, Jawlensky, and their servant moved to Munich. For the sake of Jawlensky's painting, Werefkin interrupted her painting for almost ten years. She created her first expressionist works in 1907. In these she followed Paul Gauguin's and Louis Anquetin's style of "surface painting", while also showing the influence of Edvard Munch. In 1909, the Neue Kenstlervereinigung Menchen (New Association of Artists in Munich, NKVM) was founded. It became a forum of exhibitions and programming. At the outbreak of the First World War, they immigrated to Switzerland, near Geneva. They later moved to Zurich. By 1918, they had separated, and Werefkin moved alone to Ascona, on Lago Maggiore. In 1924 she founded the artist group "Grober Bar" (i.e., Big Bear, Ursa Major).
Giuseppe Abbati
Italian, 1836-1868 Abbati was born in Naples and received early training in painting from his brother Vincenzo. He participated in Garibaldi 1860 campaign, suffering the loss of his right eye at the Battle of Capua. Afterwards he moved to Florence where, at the Caffe Michelangiolo, he met Giovanni Fattori, Silvestro Lega, and the rest of the artists who would soon be dubbed the Macchiaioli. While his early paintings were interiors, he quickly became attracted to the practice of painting landscapes en plein air. His activity as a painter was interrupted during 1866 when he enlisted again in the army for the Third Independence War, during which he was captured by the Austrians and held in Croatia. Returning to civilian life at the end of the year, he moved to Castelnuovo della Misericordia and spent the final year of his life painting in the countryside. Abbati died at the age of thirty-two in Florence after his own dog bit him, infecting him with rabies. Giuseppe Abbati, The Tower of the Palazzo del Podesta, 1865, oil on wood, 39 x 32 cm.His paintings are characterized by a bold treatment of light effects. He often painted a luminous landscape scene as seen through the doorway of a darkened interior, as in the View from the Wine Cellar of Diego Martelli (1866). Some of his late landscapes are in the greatly elongated horizontal format often favored by the Macchiaioli.
Marsden Hartley
1877-1943 Marsden Hartley (January 4, 1877 - September 2, 1943) was an American Modernist painter and poet in the early 20th century. Hartley was born in Lewiston, Maine, USA. He began his art training at the Cleveland Institute of Art after moving to Cleveland, Ohio in 1892. At the age of 22, he moved to New York City, where he attended the National Academy of Design and studied painting at the Art Students League of New York under William Merritt Chase. A great admirer of Albert Pinkham Ryder, Hartley would visit Ryder's studio in Greenwich Village as often as possible. While in New York, he came to the attention of Alfred Stieglitz and became associated with Stieglitz' 291 Gallery Group. Hartley had his first major exhibition at the 291 Gallery in 1909 and another in 1912. He was in the cultural vanguard, in the same milieu as Gertrude Stein, Hart Crane, Charles Demuth, Georgia O'Keeffe, Fernand Leger, Ezra Pound, among many others. Hartley, who was gay, painted Portrait of a German Officer (1914), which was an ode to Karl von Freyburg, a Prussian lieutenant of whom he became enamored before von Freyburg's death in World War I.