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 :. | Mr and Mrs. Andrews | The Harvest wagon | Queen Charlotte (mk25) | Henry Duke of Cumberland (mk25) | Cottage Girl with Dog and pitcher |
Related Artists:
Cornelis Bisschop
In ca. 1650 he was a student of Ferdinand Bol in Amsterdam. In 1653 he was back in Dordrecht, where he got married. According to Houbraken he was the first to paint carved trompe l'oeil wooden panels in such an ingenious way that they became quite popular. He painted historical allegories, portraits, still lifes, and genre-works. He was asked to paint for the Danish court, but he died unexpectedly, leaving his wife and eleven children. Of these children, two sons (Abraham (1660-1700) & Jacobus Bisschop (1658-1698)) and three daughters became painters. These had been his students when he died, and Margaretha van Godewijk studied with his daughters. She wrote an emblem about his self-portrait with a curtain, which illustrates the legend of Zeuxis. His son Jacobus later became a student of Augustinus Terwesten in the Confrerie Pictura
Nebbia, Cesare
Italian, 1536-1614 Italian painter and draughtsman. He was a pupil of GIROLAMO MUZIANO and much influenced by Federico Zuccaro, and Vasari cited him as a promising painter. Between 1562 and 1575 Nebbia was continuously employed in Orvieto, producing altarpieces and frescoes in the cathedral, for example the Marriage at Cana (1569), the Crucifixion (1574) and the Crowning with Thorns (1575; all Orvieto, Mus. Opera Duomo). In Rome, where from 1579 his name appeared in the register of the Accademia di S Luca, he executed an Ecce homo and another Crowning with Thorns (1576; oratory of the Gonfalone), a Noli me tangere (1579; S Maria degli Angeli), decorations in the Sforza Chapel, S Maria Maggiore (1582), Heraclius Taking the Cross (1582-4; Santissimo Crocifisso), the Martyrdom of St Lawrence (1589; S Susanna) and decorations in the Borghese Chapel, Trinit? dei Monti (c. 1590). Under Pope Sixtus V he was responsible, with Giovanni Guerra, for the decorations in the Sistine Library, and he also worked on the Scala Santa, in the Vatican Palace and in the Lateran Palace. In 1597 he was principal of the Accademia di S Luca. Two years later he received payment for the cartoons of St Matthew and St Mark for the mosaics in the cupola of St Peter's. The following year he painted the Dream of Constantine (S Giovanni in Laterano). In 1603-4 he decorated, with Zuccaro, the hall in the Collegio Borromeo, Pavia. He retired to Orvieto in 1609.
Adolf von Hildebrand
1847 Marburg-1921 Munich, He was a sculptor, the son of Marburg economics professor Bruno Hildebrand. He was the author of Das Problem der Form in der Bildenden Kunst ("The Problem of Form in Painting and Sculpture"). From 1873 he lived in Florence in San Francesco, a secularized sixteenth-century monastery. In 1877 he married Irene Schäuffelen. He spent significant time in Munich after 1889 executing a monumental fountain there, the Wittelsbacher Brunnen. He is known for five monumental urban fountains. He was ennobled by the King of Bavaria in 1904, He was the father of the painter Eva, Elizabeth, sculptor Irene Georgii-Hildebrand, Sylvie, Bertele, and Catholic theologian Dietrich von Hildebrand.