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 :. | miss haverfield, c | Mrs Thomas Hibbert. Neue Pinakothek. | A woman in Blue | Portrait of Henrietta Vernon 10 | Portrait of Mrs |
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Jakub Schikaneder
(February 27, 1855, Prague - November 15, 1924, Prague) was a Czech painter, known for his soft paintings of the outdoors, often lonely in mood. The National Gallery in Prague held an exhibition of his paintings from May 1998 until January 1999. He was descended from Urban Schikaneder, the elder brother of the librettist Emanuel Schikaneder.
Henri Felix Emmanuel Philippoteaux
(1815-1884) was a French artist. He was born in Paris, France, studied art at the studio of Leon Cogniet,and first exhibited his work at the Paris Salon of 1833. One of his most well-known works was a depiction of the Siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War, painted in the form of a cyclorama, a type of large panoramic painting on the inside of a cylindrical platform designed to provide a viewer standing in the middle of the cylinder with a view of the painting. Viewers surrounded by the panoramic image are meant to feel as if they are standing in the midst of a historic event or famous place. Philippoteaux also produced a large number of works chronicling the rise and successes of Napoleon Bonaparte, including a portrait of Napoleon in his regimental uniform and a group of paintings of French victories in the Napoleonic Wars. Philippoteaux was awarded the Legion d'honneur in 1846. Philippoteaux's son Paul Philippoteaux was also an artist; both were famous for their production of cycloramas. Father and son collaborated on The Defence of the Fort d'Issy in 1871.
Jacob Claesz van Utrecht
also named by his signature Jacobus Traiectensis (born c. 1479 - dead after 1525) was a Flemish early Renaissance painter who worked in Antwerp and Lebeck. Jacob van Utrecht's life is still very much in the dark. Research on this important Flemish artist did not start before the end of 19th century. He was probably born in Utrecht, although it is not certain. It is assumed that he became a citizen of Antwerp around 1500 and he is recorded as a "free master craftsman" of the Guild of St Luke there from 1506 to 1512. From 1519 to 1525 he is recorded as a member of the Leonardsbruderschaft ("Leonard's Brotherhood"), a religious confraternity of merchants in Lebeck among whose ranks the leaders of the Protestant Reformation in the 1530s could be found. From then on no traces of his life have been found.