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 :. | The Harvest wagon | John Campbell | Mr and Mrs Andrews | A Cottage Girl with Dog and Pitcher | Countess Howe |
Related Artists:
Lorens Gottman
(1708 -1779 ) - Painter
Olga Wisinger-Florian
Austria born 1844 - died 1926 was an Austrian impressionist painter, mainly of landscapes and flower still lifes. She was a notable representative of Austrian Mood Impressionism. Having trained as a concert pianist, Wisinger-Florian switched to painting in the mid-1870s. She was a student of Melchior Fritsch, August Schaeffer, and Emil Jakob Schindler. From 1881 she regularly showed paintings at the annual exhibitions mounted at the artist's house and later often showed at Vienna Secession exhibitions. Work she showed at the Paris and Chicago international exhibitions earned her worldwide acclaim. The artist, who was also active in the middle-class women's movements of the time, was awarded numerous distinctions and prizes. Wisinger-Florian's early paintings can be assigned to what is known as Austrian Mood Impressionism. In her landscape paintings she adopted Schindler's sublime approach to nature. The motifs she employed, such as views of tree-lined avenues, gardens and fields, were strongly reminiscent of her teacher's work. After breaking with Schindler in 1884, however, the artist went her own way. Her conception of landscape became more realistic.
gosta adrian-nilsson
Gösta Adrian-Nilsson, GAN, född 2 april 1884 i Lund, död 29 mars 1965 i Stockholm, svensk konstnär och författare. Räknas som en betydande pionjär inom den svenska modernistiska konsten. GAN debuterade som konstnär 1907 med en utställning på Lunds universitets konstmuseum. Efter studier i bl.a. Köpenhamn for han 1913 till Berlin för att studera modernismen. I Berlin kom han genom författaren Herwarth Waldens galleri Der Sturm i kontakt med futurism, expressionism och kubism. Influerad av dessa ismer skapade GAN sedan sin nya, modernistiska stil. 1916 flyttade han till Stockholm där han genom sin modernistiska konst och sin propaganda för den nya konsten, väckte stor uppmärksamhet. Att GAN var homosexuell avspeglas i flera av hans verk. Till exempel var han periodvis nästan maniskt fixerad vid sjömän och han dyrkade maskulin kraft. Andra favoritmotiv var manliga idrottsutövare. Samtidigt var den homosexuella erotiken både förbjuden och tabubelagd och GAN tvingades att leva ett dubbelliv. Mellan 1920 och 1925 bodde och arbetade GAN i Paris där han kom i kontakt med Fernand L??ger. Kontakten med denne ledde till att GAN:s inriktning mot kubismen förstärktes. Under 1930-talet anslöt han sig till surrealismen. Förutom oljemålningar finns akvareller med folkvisemotiv samt gobelängkartonger bland hans verk. Dessa "säljbara" verk gjorde GAN dock i de flesta fall av ekonomiska skäl snarare än konstnärliga. Han skrev även dikter, noveller och barnböcker.