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 :. | Suffolk landscape | Sir Benjamin Thompson | Cornard wood | Mrs. Siddons | Mrs.Siddons |
Related Artists:
Maron, Anton von
Austrian, 1733-1808 Austrian painter. He studied at the Vienna Akademie and, in 1755, he went to Rome, where he was based for the rest of his life. From 1756 to 1761 he was first the pupil then the assistant of Anton Raphael Mengs. In 1765 he married Mengs's sister, the miniature painter Theresia Concordia Mengs. After collaborating on Mengs's fresco paintings in Rome (at S Eusebio and the Villa Albani; both in situ), Maron, working independently in Rome, spent some time on altar pictures (S Maria dell'Anima) and on various decorative projects. Mengs's influence is evident in Maron's ceiling pictures in the casino of the Villa Borghese (1784; in situ), where five paintings tell the Story of Aeneas and Dido in the style of quadri riportati, using clear construction, sharply defined drawing and a historical concept based on antiquity. Although he received many commissions for this type of work, Maron's true gifts lay in the field of portraiture. Along with Pompeo Batoni, Maron was the most celebrated portrait painter in 18th-century Rome, and he received an enormous number of commissions from princes, diplomats and church dignitaries and from English aristocrats visiting Rome as part of their Grand Tour. Maron painted such sitters in the same style as did Batoni, usually full-length and life-size, in elegantly fashionable dress, against backgrounds of Classical sculptures and views of Rome. Portraits such as those of Francis, Prince of Anhalt Dessau
Willem Maris
Dutch Painter, 1844-1910 Brother of Jacob Maris. He received his training as a painter from his brothers, Jacob Maris and Matthijs Maris. Although he briefly attended evening classes at the Academie in The Hague and was advised by the animal painter Pieter Stortenbeker (1828-98), he was basically self-taught; he was the only self-made man in the circle of Hague school artists. In 1862 he visited Oosterbeek where he met Anton Mauve, with whom he established a long friendship. In the same year he first entered a painting, Cows on the Heath (untraced), in the Tentoonstellung van Levende Meesters in Rotterdam. The themes of cows at pasture and ducks by the side of a ditch, which characterized the Dutch polder landscape in summer, became his hallmark. In the following year he exhibited Cows by a Pool (The Hague, Gemeentemus) in The Hague; it received discouraging reviews, as did the picture entered by his brother Matthijs. Painted in 1863, this work already employs Willem main motif and shows his attention to the handling of light (with effects of haze and backlighting).
Luca Cambiaso
Luca Cambiasi (surname also written Cambiaso or Cangiagio; 1527 - 1585) was an Italian painter and draftsman, familiarly known as Lucchetto da Genova.