American Colonial Era Painter, 1738-1815
John Singleton Copley (1738[1] - 1815) was an American painter, born presumably in Boston, Massachusetts and a son of Richard and Mary Singleton Copley, both Irish. He is famous for his portrait paintings of important figures in colonial New England, depicting in particular middle-class subjects. His paintings were innovative in their tendency to depict artifacts relating to these individuals' lives. Related Paintings of John Singleton Copley :. | Mr Mrs Thomas Miffin | Portrait of Thomas Gage | The Three Youngest Daughters of King George III | Samuel Adams | Portrait of Thomas Greene | Related Artists:
Andries van Eertvelt1590-1652
Flemish
Andries van Eertvelt Location
Flemish painter. He enrolled as a member of Antwerp Guild of St Luke in 1609. In 1615 he married Catherine Vlieger (d 1627), after whose death he went to Genoa, where he worked for Cornelis de Wael. By c. 1630 he was back in Antwerp, where he had his portrait painted by Anthony van Dyck (1632; Augsburg, Schaezlerpal.). In 1633 Eertvelt married Elisabeth Boots, probably a daughter of the Antwerp painter Jan Boots (b before 1620). Eertvelt is regarded as the first Flemish marine painter. Over the years his palette and style changed. His first paintings, mostly of ships in storms (e.g. Sea Battle in a Storm; Schwerin, Staatl. Mus.), were painted in greenish-black and brown tones, often using white to highlight the rigging against the dark sea. After his tour of Italy he favoured views of southern harbours, with calm seas painted in soft tones (e.g. Spanish Ships Leaving a Port; Vienna, Ksthist. Mus.). In his day Eertvelt was a man of distinction whose artistic qualities were praised by the poet Cornelis de Bie and whose marine paintings were appreciated abroad, some being exported as far as Seville and Lisbon. His pupils included Gaspard van Eyck (1613-73), Hendrik Minderhout (1632-96) and Matthieu van Plattenberg.
GAINSBOROUGH, ThomasEnglish 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.
antonio canalettoGiovanni Antonio Canal (28 October 1697 - 19 April 1768) better known as Canaletto, was a Venetian painter famous for his landscapes, or vedute, of Venice. He was also an important printmaker in etching.