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 :. | Mrs Lownds Stone | Portrait of Johann Christian Fischer | The hon.frances duncombe | Portrait of Henry Wise | Woman in Blue |
Related Artists:
abel faivre
Il tudie trois ans l'École des beaux-arts de Lyon, puis a la Societe nationale et a l'Academie Julian de Paris aupres de Jules Lefebvre et Benjamin Constant. Il a souvent expose a la societe des Artistes Francais et a ete medaille de 3e classe a l'Exposition de 1894. Medaille d'honneur a l'Exposition de Lyon, il aurait vecu et travaill?? a La Croix-Valmer (Var) ou un boulevard porte son nom. Il est devenu celebre par ses affiches pour soutenir l'effort de guerre francais (1914-1918). Il a egalement travaille pour le journal humoristique Le Rire et pour Le Figaro. Ses caricatures sont visibles au Musee Jean Jaures a Castres. À titre indicatif, un exemplaire original de son affiche Sports d'Hiver, Chamonix datant de 1905 etait estime a 6000 £ par une celebre salle de ventes en 2002. Une huile sur toile La Belle Odalisque (89x61 cm) se vendit 8 000 euros en 2006.
Benjamin Blake
United Kingdom (1757- 1830 ) - Painter painted Still life of game in a larder in 1830
woman embroidering
sixteenth century courtly life tapestry paris musee de cluny