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 :. | Detail of Portrait of Mr and Mrs Andrews | Portrait of Hon.Charles Hamilton | Detail of Portrait of Mr and Mrs Andrews | Portrait of Sarah Kirby and John Joshua Kirby | Mrs Mary Robinson (mk25 |
Related Artists:
School of Latium
First half of the thirteenth century
NAIVEU, Matthijs
Dutch painter (1647-1726) Dutch painter. He was the son of a wine merchant from Rotterdam and began his training with Abraham Toorenvliet (c. 1620-92), a glass painter and drawing master in Leiden. From 1667 to 1669 Naiveu was apprenticed to the Leiden 'Fine' painter Gerrit Dou, who received 100 guilders a year (an exceptionally high sum) for instructing Naiveu. In 1671 Naiveu entered the Leiden Guild of St Luke, of which he became the head in 1677 and again in 1678, the year in which he moved to Amsterdam, where he was later appointed hop inspector. This work did not prevent him producing a considerable number of paintings; the earliest known work by Naiveu is dated 1668, the latest 1721.
Edward Armitage
(May 20, 1817 - May 24, 1896) was an English Victorian era painter whose work focussed on historical, classical and biblical subjects. Armitage was born in London to a family of wealthy Yorkshire industrialists, the eldest of seven sons of James Armitage (1793 - 1872) and Anne Elizabeth Armitage nee Rhodes (1788 - 1833), of Farnley Hall, just south of Leeds, Yorkshire. His great-grandfather James (1730 - 1803) bought Farnley Hall from Sir Thomas Danby in 1799 and in 1844 four Armitage brothers, including his father James, founded the Farnley Ironworks, utilising the coal, iron and fireclay on their estate. His brother Thomas Rhodes Armitage (1824 - 1890) founded the Royal National Institute of the Blind. Armitage was the uncle of Robert Armitage (MP), the great-uncle of Robert Selby Armitage, and first cousin twice removed of Edward Leathley Armitage.