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 :. | Self Portrait ss | Grace Elliott | Queen Charlotte (mk25) | Gainsborough Daughter Mary | Drinkstone Park |
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CORNELIUS, Peter
1824-1874,German composer. Trained as actor and violinist, and friend of artists, poets and writers, he devoted himself to music from the 1840s, finding inspiration in Liszt and the New German School at Weimar in 1852. His first mature works were the lieder opp. 1 and 2 and the song cycle Trauer und Trost op.3, followed by the comic opera Der Barbier von Bagdad (1855-8); all show his literary skill, refreshing simplicity and musical independence from the Liszt circle. In Vienna (1859-65), he wrote his second opera Der Cid and enjoyed fruitful relationships with Brahms, Carl Tausig and above all Wagner, who summoned him to Munich in 1865 as his private repetiteur and teacher at the Royal School of Music. His third opera Gunlöd was never finished. He continued to write poetry and essays defending Wagner and Liszt and translated vocal works by Pergolesi, Berlioz, Liszt and others. Although he revered Wagner, he stood ethically and artistically apart, his work (especially Der Barbier) thus representing an original achievement.
Leo-Paul Robert
impression atist 1851?C1923
Olivier, Woldemar Friedrich
German, 1791-1859 .Painter and draughtsman, brother of Heinrich Olivier and Ferdinand Olivier. He first studied in Dessau under the court sculptor Friedemann Hunold (1773-1840), a pupil of Johann Gottfried Schadow, before teaching himself to paint. Following the return of his brothers from Paris, he toured the Harz with Ferdinand in 1810 and in 1811 moved with him, via Dresden, to Vienna. There he drew nudes and antiquities at the Akademie der Bildenden Kenste. In 1813-14 he participated in the uprising against Napoleonic occupation in the Letzow volunteer corps, along with his friends from Vienna, Theodor Kerner, Joseph von Eichendorff and Philipp Veit. After Kerner fell at Gadebusch (26 August 1813), Friedrich sketched him on his deathbed (Dessau, Anhalt Gemeldegal.).