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 :. | Lady in Blue | Gainsborough | The Honourable mas graham mars Graham was one of the many society beauties Gainsborough painted in order to make a living | Cottage Girl with Dog and pitcher | Self-Portrait |
Related Artists:
MIGNON, Abraham
Dutch Baroque Era Painter, 1640-1679 Dutch painter, was born at Frankfurt. His father, a merchant, placed him under the still-life painter Jacob Marrel, by whom he was taken to the Netherlands about 1660. He then worked under Jan Davidszoon de Heem at Utrecht, where in 1675 he married the daughter of the painter Cornelis Willaerts. Sibylle Merian (1647-1717), daughter of the engraver Matthew Merian, became his pupil and achieved distinction as a flower painter. He died at Utrecht. Mignon devoted himself almost exclusively to flowers, fruit, birds and other still-life, though at times he also attempted portraiture. His flower pieces are marked by careful finish and delicate handling. His favourite scheme was to introduce red or white roses in the centre of the canvas and to set the whole group of flowers against a dark background. Nowhere can his work be seen to better advantage than at the Dresden Gallery, which contains fifteen of his paintings, twelve of which are signed. Six of his pictures are at the Louvre, four at the Hermitage, and other examples are to be found at the museums of Amsterdam,
Jacobus Storck
(1641 - c.1700) was a Dutch Golden Age marine painter. Storck was born and died in Amsterdam. According to Houbraken he was the brother of the marine painter Abraham Storck who painted views of the Rhine and inland ships, but who was not as gifted. According to the RKD he was the second son of the marine painter Johannes Sturckenburgh, younger brother of the marine painter Johannes Storck and older brother of Abraham. Signed works by him are dated 1664-1687. He sometimes signed JA Storck, which since 1963 has been interpreted as a work by both Jacobus and Abraham together.
Tobias Verhaecht
(Antwerp, 1561 - 1631) was a painter and draughtsman active in Antwerp, Florence and Rome. Primarily a landscape painter, his style is indebted to mannerist world landscapes of artists like Joachim Patinir with high viewpoints, fantastic distant perspectives and three-colour scheme. Before Verhaecht entered Antwerp's guild of St. Luke in 1590-91, he had already spent time in Italy, first in Florence, and then as a fresco painter in Rome. Peter Paul Rubens, who was a relative by marriage, studied with him around 1592, and another student was his own son, Willem van Haecht. Verhaecht is also known for his designs for prints.