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 :. | mrs.richard brinsley sheridan | Portrait of Lady Margaret Georgiana Poyntz | Mr and Mrs Andrews | Mr and Mrs Andrews | Mrs. Siddons |
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August Jerndorff
August Andreas Jerndorff (25 January 1846 - 28 July 1906) was a Danish painter who is best known for his portraits.
William Merritt Chase
American Impressionist Painter, 1849-1916 American painter and printmaker. He received his early training in Indianapolis from the portrait painter Barton S. Hays (1826-75). In 1869 he went to New York to study at the National Academy of Design where he exhibited in 1871. That year he joined his family in St Louis, where John Mulvaney (1844-1906) encouraged him to study in Munich. With the support of several local patrons, enabling him to live abroad for the next six years, Chase entered the Kenigliche Akademie in Munich in 1872. Among his teachers were Alexander von Wagner (1838-1919), Karl Theodor von Piloty and Wilhelm von Diez (1839-1907). Chase also admired the work of Wilhelm Leibl. The school emphasized bravura brushwork, a technique that became integral to Chase's style, favoured a dark palette and encouraged the study of Old Master painters, particularly Diego Velezquez and Frans Hals. Among Chase's friends in Munich were the American artists Walter Shirlaw, J. Frank Currier and Frederick Dielman (1847-1935)
CAMPEN, Jacob van
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1595-1657 Chief exponent of Classicism in The Netherlands. He studied architecture in Italy and was influenced by the work of Scamozzi and Palladio. With his Coymans House on the Keizersgracht, Amsterdam (1624), he introduced the Palladian style to The Netherlands. His most refined work is the Mauritshuis in The Hague (1633?C5), which has a Palladian plan, elevations featuring a Giant Order of Ionic pilasters set on a plain base, a pedimented central section given little emphasis, and a hipped roof. Much grander is the Town Hall (now Royal Palace), Amsterdam (1648?C55): it has two internal courtyards separated by a huge central hall, façades with two superimposed Giant Orders of pilasters, and a large projecting pedimented central section over which is a domed lantern. His Nieuwe Kerk (New Church), Haarlem (1645?C9), is based on the quincunx plan (essentially a Greek cross within a square), with square Ionic crossing-piers and a groin-vault over the crossing. He was responsible for the Accijnshuis, Amsterdam (1638), the Noordeinde Palace, The Hague (1640), and, with others, the decorations of Post's Huis-den-Bosch, Maarssen, near Utrecht (c.1628).