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 :. | members of the society of dilettanti | Admiral the Honourable Samuel Barrington | the schoolboy | Portrait of Alexander Wedderburn | mrs.siddons as the tragic muse |
Related Artists:
Helen Allingham,R,W.S
1848-1926 Studies of Flowers Studies of Flowers .was a well-known watercolour painter and illustrator of the Victorian era. Helen Mary Elizabeth Paterson was born in Swadlincote in Derbyshire,[1] England. Her sister and her father, a doctor, died of diphtheria in 1862, and the rest of the family went to live in Birmingham. In 1867 she went to study art at the "Female School of Art", a section of what became the Royal College of Art in London, and became an illustrator of children's books. She was a great friend of Kate Greenaway. On 22 August 1874, she married William Allingham, who was almost twice her age. At the time, she was employed in illustrating some of the novels of Thomas Hardy, and they were attracted to one another when they met. Helen Allingham illustrated several books, including Six to sixteen: a story for girls (1876), Happy England (1903) and The homes of Tennyson (1905), written with her brother Arthur Paterson. After her marriage to Allingham, she became a watercolour painter, and she was the first woman to become a full member of the Royal Watercolour Society. As well as landscapes, she completed several portraits, including one of Thomas Carlyle.
John Opie
English Painter, 1761-1807,English painter. He was born in a tin-mining district, where his father was a mine carpenter. He had a natural talent for drawing and was taken up by an itinerant doctor, John Wolcot (the poet Peter Pindar, 1738-1819), who was an amateur artist and had a number of well-connected friends. Wolcot taught Opie the rudiments of drawing and painting, providing engravings for him to copy and gaining him access to country-house collections. Opie's early portraits, such as Dolly Pentreath (1777; St Michael's Mount, Cornwall, Lord St Levan priv. col.), are the work of a competent provincial painter and owe much to his study of engravings after portraits by Rembrandt. His attempts at chiaroscuro and impasto in Rembrandt's manner gave his pictures a maturity that clearly startled contemporary audiences expecting to see works by an untutored artist. Thus in 1780, when a picture by him was exhibited in London at the Society of Artists with the description 'a Boy's Head, an Instance of Genius, not having ever seen a picture', Opie was hailed as 'the Cornish Wonder'. When he himself arrived in London, where he was promoted by Wolcot and his paintings were exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1781 and 1782, he was seen as a phenomenon, impressing even Joshua Reynolds, who is reputed to have remarked that Opie was 'like Caravaggio and Velasquez in one'.
George Hardy
(1822-1909) was an English genre painter, a member of the Cranbrook Colony and eldest brother to Frederick Daniel Hardy. Hardy was born in Brighton in Sussex the first son (of 8 children) of George Hardy (b. 1796 in London), a musician to George IV, Queen Adelaide, and Queen Victoria in the Royal household at Windsor. His mother was Sarah Lloyd (b. 1804). Hardy became an oil painter of light-hearted genre subjects and moved to the artists' colony in Cranbrook in Kent. He married Ellen Hutton in May 1862 and the couple had 3 children. Hardy died in Eastbourne in 1909.