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 :. | Woman in Blue | The Honourable | Konstnarens dottrar jaggr a fjaril | Portrait of James Christie | The Painter's Daughters Chasing a Butterfly |
Related Artists:
JONES, Thomas
Welsh Painter, 1742-1803
Philipp veit
1793 - 1877) was a German Romantic painter.German painter. The stepson, from 1804, of Friedrich von Schlegel, he studied (1808-11) at the Akademie in Dresden under Friedrich Matth?i (1777-1845) and Caspar David Friedrich. He showed talent in drawing but, on moving to Vienna in 1811, had difficulties with painting in oil, and turned to watercolour. Through Schlegel, Veit came to know many of the leading Romantics in Vienna, such as the poet and novelist Joseph von Eichendorff. In 1813-14 Veit took part in the campaign against Napoleon and returned briefly to Berlin. In 1815 he completed a votive picture, the Virgin with Christ and St John, for the church of St James in Heiligenstadt, Vienna (in situ), inspired by the work of Pietro Perugino and Raphael. In 1815 Veit left for Italy where he stayed until 1830. In Rome he joined the circle around Friedrich Overbeck and Peter Cornelius, becoming a leading Nazarene (see NAZARENES). With these artists he took part in providing fresco decorations (1816-17) for the Casa Bartholdy (now the Bibliotheca Hertziana): Veit painted the scene of Joseph and Potiphar's Wife and a decorative lunette allegory, the Seven Years of Plenty (both now Berlin, Staatl. Mussen, N.G.). In 1818 Veit was commissioned to paint the fresco of the Triumph of Religion in the Museo Chiaramonti in the Vatican, one of a series of murals recording the services of Pope Pius VII to science and art.
Anton van den Wyngaerde
1525-1571