English Rococo Era/Romantic Painter, 1727-1788 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's 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.   Related Paintings of GAINSBOROUGH, Thomas :. | Mr and Mrs William Hallett (The Morning Walk) | Landscape in Suffolk sdg | Patio Mediterraneo | River Landscape dg | Mr and Mrs Andrews dg |
Related Artists:
Giovanni Agostino da Lodi
was an Italian painter who was active from c. 1495 to c. 1525. The attribution of his works has been dubious for centuries, until his style and career was defined by the American art historian Bernard Berenson in the 1960s. One of his first identified work is the Pala dei Barcaioli ("Boatmen Altarpiece") in the church of San Pietro Martire at Murano. His only signed work is the St. Peter and St. John the Evangelist in the Pinacoteca di Brera, which shows Lombard influeces, such as that of Bramantino. Later he was also influenced by Leonardo da Vinci's style, as visible in the Christ Washing the Feet of the Apostles in the Gallerie dell'Accademia of Venice. After moving to Venice in the wake of Ludovico Sforza's fall, he returned to Milan in 1506. He subsequently executed works for privates and for the Certosa di Pavia; one of his late works, the Calvary, is housed in the National Gallery in Prague. He also collaborated with Marco d'Oggiono for a polyptych in the church of Santa Maria della Pace in Milan, some panels of which are now in the Pinacoteca di Brera.
Matthias van Helmont
Antwerp1623-after1679 Brussels
Francesco Cairo
(1607-1665) was an Italian painter active in Baroque Lombardy and Piedmont. He was born and died in Milan. It is not known where he obtained his early training though he is strongly influenced by the circle of il Morazzone, in works such as the Saint Teresa altarpiece in the Certosa di Pavia. In 1633, Cairo moved to Turin to work as a court painter, including portraits, to Vittorio Amedeo I of the House of Savoy. Between 1637-1638, Cairo travelled to Rome, where he encounters the works of Pietro da Cortona, Guido Reni and of the Caravaggisti. He returns to Lombardy to complete altarpieces for the Certosa of Pavia and a church at Casalpusterlengo. He painted a St. Theresa for San Carlo in Venice. Between 1646-1649, he returns to Turin, and paints an altarpiece for Savigliano and the church of San Salvario. He is also known as Il Cavaliere del Cairo, because in Turin, he received the order of SS. Lazarus and Maurice in recognition of his merit. Many of his works are eccentric depictions of religious ecstasies; the saints appear liquefied and contorted by piety. He often caps them with exuberant, oriental turbans.