British 1723-1792 Sir Joshua Reynolds Locations Reynolds was born in Plympton, Devon, on 16 July 1723. As one of eleven children, and the son of the village school-master, Reynolds was restricted to a formal education provided by his father. He exhibited a natural curiosity and, as a boy, came under the influence of Zachariah Mudge, whose Platonistic philosophy stayed with him all his life. Showing an early interest in art, Reynolds was apprenticed in 1740 to the fashionable portrait painter Thomas Hudson, with whom he remained until 1743. From 1749 to 1752, he spent over two years in Italy, where he studied the Old Masters and acquired a taste for the "Grand Style". Unfortunately, whilst in Rome, Reynolds suffered a severe cold which left him partially deaf and, as a result, he began to carry a small ear trumpet with which he is often pictured. From 1753 until the end of his life he lived in London, his talents gaining recognition soon after his arrival in France. Reynolds worked long hours in his studio, rarely taking a holiday. He was both gregarious and keenly intellectual, with a great number of friends from London's intelligentsia, numbered amongst whom were Dr Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, Giuseppe Baretti, Henry Thrale, David Garrick and fellow artist Angelica Kauffmann. Because of his popularity as a portrait painter, Reynolds enjoyed constant interaction with the wealthy and famous men and women of the day, and it was he who first brought together the famous figures of "The" Club. With his rival Thomas Gainsborough, Reynolds was the dominant English portraitist of 'the Age of Johnson'. It is said that in his long life he painted as many as three thousand portraits. In 1789 he lost the sight of his left eye, which finally forced him into retirement. In 1791 James Boswell dedicated his Life of Samuel Johnson to Reynolds. Reynolds died on 23 February 1792 in his house in Leicester Fields, London. He is buried in St. Paul's Cathedral.  Related Paintings of Sir Joshua Reynolds :. | anne countess of albemarle | John Julius Angerstein | Captain the Honourable John Byron | lady caroline howard | Portrait of Elizabeth Gunning, Duchess of Hamilton and Duchess of Argyll ) was a celebrated Irish belle and society hostess. |
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le dimanche
was a Spanish surrealist painter. Born in San Cristebal de La Laguna on the island of Tenerife, Domenguez spent his youth with his grandmother in Tacoronte and devoted himself to painting at a young age after suffering a serious illness which affected his growth and caused a progressive deformation of his facial bone frame and limbs. He went to Paris at 21 where he first worked for his father in the central market of Les Halles, and spent his nights drinking in cabarets. He then frequented some art schools, and visited galleries and museums. Domenguez was rapidly attracted by avant-garde painters, notably Yves Tanguy and Pablo Picasso, whose influences were visible in his first works. At 25 he painted a self-portrait full of premonition as he showed himself with a deformed hand and with the veins of his arm cut. He chose to kill himself 27 years later by cutting his veins. In 1933 Domenguez met Andre Breton, a theoretician of Surrealism, and Paul Éluard, known as the poet of this movement, and took part a year later in the Surrealist exhibition held in Copenhagen and those of London and Tenerife in 1936. He took up the Russian-invented technique of decalcomania in 1936, using gouache spread thinly on a sheet of paper or other surface (glass has been used), which is then pressed onto another surface such as a canvas.
Thomas Stothard
English Neoclassical Painter, 1755-1834,English illustrator, painter and designer. He was one of the most popular, prolific and successful artists of his time and was highly regarded by such contemporaries as Thomas Lawrence and Walter Scott. He was the son of a prosperous publican and completed his apprenticeship as a silk weaver (1770-77), before studying at the Royal Academy, London (1777-c. 1783). From the beginning of his career, book illustration was his main area of activity. His earliest surviving works are in the decorative Rococo mode, but he soon adopted the more idealistic Neo-classicism of John Hamilton Mortimer and James Barry. Together with his friends and near contemporaries, William Blake and John Flaxman, Stothard developed an austere, linear style of draughtsmanship.
Lodewyck Toeput
Mechin ca.1545-Treviso 1610