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 :. | Conversation in a Park(perhaps the Artist and His Wife) (mk05) | Pfeiferauchender Bauer vor der Huttentxr | Portrait of Uvedale Tomkins Price | Portrait of James Christie | Portrait of Giovanna Baccelli |
Related Artists:
Meyer, Jeremiah
English Painter, 1735-1789 German enameller and painter, active in England. He was the son of a portrait painter at the court of W?rttemberg. He arrived in England c. 1749 and studied in London at St Martin's Lane Academy and then (1757-8) under Christian Friedrich Zincke; as a result of this training, much of Meyer's early work was painted on enamel. He exhibited (1760-67) at the Society of Artists and in 1761 was awarded its gold medal for a profile portrait of George III. In 1762 he became a naturalized Englishman. That year he was appointed miniature painter to Queen Charlotte and in 1764 painter in enamel to the King. Meyer was a founder-member of the Royal Academy and exhibited miniatures, enamels and watercolours there (1769-83).
Augsburger Schule
painted Allegory of Remorselessness in between 1580(1580) and 1600(1600)
Joris van der Haagen
(ca. 1615 - The Hague, 23 May 1669 (buried)) was a Dutch Golden Age painter specialized in landscapes. Contents It is unclear where Joris van der Haagen was born, either in Arnhem or Dordrecht, but archival evidence shows that he started his drawing career in Arnhem. He probably learned to paint from his father, the painter Abraham van der Haagen. When his father died he moved in 1639 to the Hague, where he joined the Guild of St. Luke in 1643. A year later he became honorary citizen of The Hague. In 1656 he was one of the founding members of the Confrerie Pictura, which was located on the Princessegracht in the Hague. The painting he made of the Princessegracht at this time probably shows the original building, which has since been renovated beyond recognition.