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 :. | Oil painting by Thomas Gainsborough of Count Rumford who was an American born soldier, statesman, scientist, inventor and social reformer. | Portrait of Carl Friedrich Abel | Self-portrait | Portrait of Lady Margaret Georgiana Poyntz later Margaret Georgiana Spencer, Countess Spencer | Marjor John Dade of Tannington,Suffolk |
Related Artists:
rameau
Period: Baroque (1600-1749) Country: France Born: September 25, 1683 in Dijon, France Died: September 12, 1764 in Paris, France Genres: Ballet, Chamber Music, Keyboard Music, Miscellaneous Music, Opera, Orchestral Music
Constance Marie Charpentier
(born 1767 Paris, France - August 3, 1849 France) was a French painter. She specialized in sentimental genre scenes and portraits, mainly children and women. She was also known as Constance Marie Bondelu. She studied under Jacques-Louis David and Francois Gerard. In 1788 she received a 'Prix d'Encouragement.' From 1795 to 1819 she exhibited at the Salon where she received a gold medal.
Henriette Lorimier
(7 August 1775, Paris - 1 April 1854) was a popular portraitist in Paris at the beginning of Romanticism. She lived with the French diplomat and philhellene writer Francois Pouqueville (1770-1838). student of the history painter Jean-Baptiste Regnault, she soon exhibited fine portraits and genre paintings at the Paris' Salons from 1800 to 1806 and from 1810 to 1814. In 1805 Princess Caroline Murat-Bonaparte, a sister of the Emperor, purchased "La Chevre Nourriciere" a painting exhibited at the 1804 Salon and in 1806 Henriette Lorimier was awarded a First Class Medal for her painting of "Jeanne de Navarre" which was then purchased by the Empress Josephine de Beauharnais, consort of the Emperor Napoleon Ier.