1727-1788 British Thomas Gainsborough Locations 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 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. His portraits, landscapes and subject pictures are only now coming to be studied in all their complexity; having previously been viewed as being isolated from the social, philosophical and ideological currents of their time, they have yet to be fully related to them. It is clear, however, that his landscapes and rural pieces, and some of his portraits, were as significant as Reynolds acknowledged them to be in 1788.  Related Paintings of Thomas Gainsborough :. | Portrai of Mary,Mrs John Vere | Woman in Blue | The Fallen Tree | Mr and Mrs William Hallett | A Coastal Landscape |
Related Artists:
William Aikman
William Aikman (24 October 1682 - 7 June 1731) was a Scottish portrait-painter. Aikman was the son of William Aikman, of Cairney. His father intended that he should follow the law, and gave him an education suitable to these views; but the strong predilection of the son to the fine arts induced him to attach himself to painting alone. Poetry, painting, and music have, with justice, been called sister arts. Mr. Aikman was fond of poetry; and was particularly delighted with those unforced strains which, proceeding from the heart, are calculated to touch the congenial feelings of sympathetic minds. It was this propensity that attached him so warmly to Allan Ramsay, the Doric bard of Scotland. Though younger than Ramsay, Mr. Aikman, while at college, formed an intimate acquaintance with him, which constituted a principal part of his happiness at that time, and of which he always bore the tenderest recollection. It was the same delicate bias of mind which at a future period of his life attached him so warmly to Thomson, who then unknown, and unprotected, stood in need of, and obtained the warmest patronage of Aikman; who perhaps considered it as one of the most fortunate occurrences in his life that he had it in his power to introduce this young poet of nature to Sir Robert Walpole, who wished to be reckoned the patron of genius, and to Arbuthnot, Swift, Pope, Gay, and the other beaux esprits of that brilliant period. Thomson could never forget this kindness; and when he had the misfortune, too soon, to lose this warm friend and kind protector, he bewailed the loss in strains distinguished by justness of thought, and genuine pathos of expression.
Arthur Bowen Davies
1862-1928 Arthur Bowen Davies Gallery Arthur Bowen Davies (September 26, 1863 ?C October 24, 1928) was an avant-garde American artist. He was born in Utica, New York and studied at the Chicago Academy of Design from 1879 to 1882. He briefly attended the Art Institute of Chicago and then moved to New York City where he studied at the Art Students League. Davies was a principal organizer of the 1913 Armory Show and was a member of The Eight, a group of painters including five associated with the Ashcan school: William Glackens (1870-1938), Robert Henri (1865-1929), George Luks (1867-1933), Everett Shinn (1876-1953) and John French Sloan (1871-1951), along with Arthur B. Davies (1862-1928), Ernest Lawson (1873-1939) and Maurice Prendergast (1859-1924). Davies is best known for his ethereal figure paintings. He worked as a billboard painter, engineering draftsman, and magazine illustrator.
SWANEVELT, Herman van
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, ca.1600-1655 Dutch painter, draughtsman and etcher, active in France and Italy. His first signed and dated works are two views of Paris dated 1623 (Brunswick, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Mus.). He was in Rome from 1629 to 1641. His earliest dated painting there is an Old Testament Scene (1630; The Hague, Mus. Bredius; see fig.), a compositional formula that he often used, with some variations, in Rome. A flat, low foreground is closed on the left by a house and a tree; on the right is a distant hilly scene; and groups of figures are disposed horizontally. This design, derived from Cornelis van Poelenburch, is well suited to van Swanevelt's many landscapes with biblical and mythological subjects. The large tree extending beyond the frame gives a monumental touch to the composition.