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 :. | Portrait of Sarah Kirby | The Blue Boy | Portrait of Johann Christian Fischer | Detail of Portrait of Sarah,Mrs Tobias Rustat | View in Suffolk |
Related Artists:
Giuseppe Grisoni
bapt. October 24, 1699 - 1769) was a Flemish/ Italian painter and sculptor, noted for his landscapes and historical tableaux. Born in Mons, he studied in Florence under Tommaso Redi, abandoning his Flemish influences for the Italian tradition. In 1715 he travelled to London with John Talman and tried to establish himself as a portrait painter. One of his pupils was William Hoare (1707-1792)
John Trumbull
1756-1843 John Trumbull Gallery Trumbull was born in Lebanon, Connecticut, to Jonathan Trumbull, who was Governor of Connecticut from 1769 to 1784. He entered the 1771 junior class at Harvard University at age fifteen and graduated in 1773. Due to a childhood accident, Trumbull lost use of one eye, which may have influenced his detailed painting style. As a soldier in the American Revolutionary War, Trumbull rendered a particular service at Boston by sketching plans of the British works, and witnessed the famous Battle of Bunker Hill. He was appointed second personal aide to General George Washington, and in June 1776 deputy adjutant-general to General Horatio Gates, but resigned from the army in 1777. In 1780 he traveled to London where he studied under Benjamin West, who suggested to him that he paint small pictures of the War of Independence and miniature portraits, of which he produced about 250 in his lifetime. On September 23, 1780 and October 2, 1780, British agent Major John Andr?? was, respectively, captured and hanged as a spy in America. News reached Europe, and as an officer of similar rank as Andr?? in the Continental Army, Trumbull was imprisoned for seven months in London's Tothill Fields Bridewell. In 1784 he was again in London working under West, in whose studio he painted his Battle of Bunker Hill and Death of Montgomery, both of which are now in the Yale University Art Gallery. In 1785 Trumbull went to Paris, where he made portrait sketches of French officers for The Surrender of Cornwallis, and began, with the assistance of Jefferson, Declaration of Independence, well-known from the engraving by Asher Brown Durand. This latter painting was purchased by the United States Congress along with his Surrender of General Burgoyne, Surrender at Yorktown, and Washington Resigning his Commission, and these paintings now hang in the United States Capitol. Trumbull's The Sortie Made by the Garrison of Gibraltar, 1789, owned by the Boston Athenaeum, is now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.
BELLANGE, Jacques
French Painter, ca.1575-1616 Jacques Bellange (c. 1575, place unknown - 1616) was an artist and printmaker from Lorraine, now in France, whose etchings and some drawings are his only securely identified works today. They are among the most striking Mannerist old master prints. His known artistic activity dates only from 1602 to 1616 and he is now familiar chiefly for his etchings and drawings, all his decorative works and most of his paintings having perished. His highly idiosyncratic style was inspired by such Italian artists as Parmigianino, by the School of Fontainebleau and by northern artists including Albrecht D?rer and Bartholomeus Spranger. His work would seem to express a private and nervous religious sensibility through a style of the greatest refinement.