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 :. | Master John Heathcote dfg | Mr and Mrs William Hallett (The Morning Walk) | Ritt zum Markt | Six studies of a cat | Conversation in a Park sd |
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Marco Marziale
Italian Painter, active ca.1492-1507,Italian painter. He was first recorded in 1492 as one of several assistants to Giovanni Bellini in the Doge's Palace in Venice; in an inscription on his earliest known work, a damaged Virgin and Child with Saints and a Donor (1495; Zadar, St Mary, Treasury), he called himself a pupil of Gentile Bellini. Visual confirmation of his close association with both Bellini brothers is provided by the rather large number of his signed and dated works, many of which are closely based on compositional motifs by Giovanni, but which in their linearity and angularity more closely resemble the style of Gentile. The influence of German art, and of Derer in particular, has often been noted in the sharply focused and densely packed details, the harsh modelling and the expressive ugliness found in much of Marziale's work.
Baron Pierre-Narcisse Guerin
(13 May 1774 - 6 July 1833) was a French painter. Guerin was born in Paris. A pupil of Jean-Baptiste Regnault, he carried off one of the three grands prix offered in 1796, in consequence of the competition not having taken place since 1793. In 1799, his painting Marcus Sextus (Louvre) was exhibited at the Salon and excited wild enthusiasm. Part of this was due to the subject - a victim of Sulla's proscription returning to Rome to find his wife dead and his house in mourning - in which an allusion was found to the turmoil of the French Revolution. Guerin on this occasion was publicly crowned by the president of the Institute, and went to Rome to study under Joseph-Benoît Suvee. In 1800, unable to remain in Rome on account of his health, he went to Naples, where he painted the Grave of Amyntas. In 1802 Guerin produced Phaedra and Hippolytus (Louvre); in 1810, after his return to Paris, he again achieved a great success with Andromache and Pyrrhus (Louvre); and in the same year also exhibited Cephalus and Aurora (Louvre) and Bonaparte and the Rebels of Cairo (Versailles). These paintings suited the popular taste of the First Empire, being highly melodramatic and pompously dignified. The Restoration brought to Guerin fresh honours; he had received from the first consul in 1803 the cross of the Legion of Honour, and in 1815 Louis XVIII named to the Academie des Beaux-Arts. His style changed to accord with popular taste. In Aeneas Relating to Dido the Disasters of Troy (Louvre), Guerin adopted a more sensuous, picturesque style. Guerin was commissioned to paint for the Madeleine a scene from the history of St Louis, but his health prevented him from accomplishing what he had begun, and in 1822 he accepted the post of director of the French Academy in Rome, which in 1816 he had refused. On returning to Paris in 1828, Guerin, who had previously been made chevalier of the order of St. Michel, was ennobled. He now attempted to complete Pyrrhus and Priam, a work which he had begun at Rome, but in vain; his health had finally broken down, and in the hope of improvement he returned to Italy with Horace Vernet. Shortly after his arrival at Rome Baron Guerin died, on the 6th of July 1833, and was buried in the church of La Trinite de Monti by the side of Claude Lorrain.
Joseph Decamp
1858-1923 Joseph Rodefer DeCamp (November 5, 1858 - February 11, 1923) was an American painter. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, he studied with Frank Duveneck in that city. In the second half of the 1870s he went with Duveneck and fellow students to the Royal Academy of Munich, then spent time in Florence, Italy, returning to Boston in 1883. He became known as a member of the Boston school led by Edmund Charles Tarbell and Emil Otto Grundmann, focusing on figure painting, and in the 1890s adopting the style of Tonalism. He was a founder of the Ten American Painters, a group of American Impressionists, in 1897. A 1904 fire in his Boston studio destroyed several hundred of his early paintings, including nearly all of his landscapes. He died in Boca Grande, Florida.