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 :. | Ritt zum Markt | Thomas Graham | Mrs Sarah Siddons dfg | Tochter des Kunstlers | The Artist-s Daughters with a Cat |
Related Artists:
Alberto Pasini
Italian Painter, 1826-1899
Jacobus Theodorus Abels
1803-1866
Regis-Francois Gignoux
1816-1882 French/American Regis-Francois Gignoux Gallery French painter who was active in the United States from 1840 to 1870. He was born in Lyon, France and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts under with the French painter Paul Delaroche (1797-1856). Gignoux arrived in the United States from France in 1840 and opened a studio in Brooklyn, New York. He was a member of the National Academy of Design, and was the first president of the Brooklyn Art Academy. George Inness (1825-1894) and John LaFarge (1835-1910) were both his students. Gignoux was the only member of the Hudson River School to specialize in snow scenes. He returned to France in 1870 and died in Paris in 1882. The Brooklyn Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), the Georgia Museum of Art (University Of Georgia, Athens), the High Museum of Art (Atlanta, Georgia), the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the Hood Museum of Art (Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire), the Museum of Art at Brigham Young University (Provo, Utah), the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City, Missouri), the New York Historical Society (New York City), the Parrish Art Museum (Southampton, New York), Smith College Museum of Art (Northampton, Massachusetts), the United States Capital Art Collection (Washington, D. C.), the Walters Art Museum (Baltimore, Maryland) and the Watson Gallery (Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts) are among the public collections holding work by R??gis François Gignoux.