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 :. | Portrait of Mr and Mrs Carter of Bullingdon House | Portrait of John Sparrowe | Pfeiferauchender Bauer vor der Huttentxr | The Watering Place | Suffolk Landscape |
Related Artists:
Ferdinand Lepie
painted River by night in 1872
Luigi Premazzi
(Milan, 1814 - Istanbul, Turkey, 1891) was an Italian painter. Premazzi attended the Brera Academy of Fine Arts and then the private school run by Giovanni Migliara. His early watercolours, based on the works of his master, were produced for the lithographic industry. His oeuvre is characterised by a repertoire of urban views produced in accordance with the dictates of perspective painting. While most of these are set in Milan, other Italian cities were also featured in later years. His smooth, precise painting also shows the influence of his contemporary Luigi Bisi in its descriptive focus on architectural detail. He presented work regularly at the exhibitions of the Societe Promotrice di Belle Arti in Turin from 1842 to 1848 as well as those of the Brera Academy. Having moved to Saint Petersburg around 1850, he became a teacher at the Imperial School of Fine Arts there in 1861. Frequent stays in the Caucasus and the Middle East provided new subjects for his paintings, which he continued to send to Italian exhibitions, where they aroused wonder and curiosity.
j. g. sandberg
Johan Gustaf Sandberg, född 1782, död 1854, var målare; han var professor i teckning vid Konstakademien från 1828, och direktör där 1845?C1853. Sandberg ägnade sig främst åt historiemåleri, med motiv ur nordisk mytologi och svensk historia. Hans främsta verk inom detta område är kalkmålningarna över Gustav Vasa i Uppsala domkyrka. Han målade också en mängd porträtt. Efter akademiska studier i Åbo med början 1783, och Uppsala, dit han flyttade 1788, blev han filosofie magister 1791. Han blev 1792 extra ordinarie kanslist i akademiska kansliet. Juris utriusque kandidat blev han 1792 och kort därefter docent vid juridiska fakulteten, blev juris licentiat 1800 och utnämndes 1807 till jurisprudentiä, oeconomiæ et commerciorum professor i Uppsala. Juris utriusque doktor 1810; arbetande ledamot i Lagkommissionen 1811-1814; ledamot av Krigsvetenskapsakademien 1810, Lantbruksakademien 1812, Vetenskapssocieteten i Uppsala 1829 samt flera andra lärda samfund. År 1834 erhöll han adlig värdighet och tog avsked från sin professur 1837. Lars Rabenius ligger begravd på Uppsala gamla kyrkogård.