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 Grace Elliot | Master John Heathcote | Portrait of Ann Ford | Landschaft mit dem Dorfe Cornard | Girl with Pigs |
Related Artists:
Kazimierz Wojniakowski
(1771-1812) was a Polish painter. Wojniakowski was a pupil of Marcello Bacciarelli. His work as a portraitist was influenced by that of the Polish painter Jezef Grassi, as in Wojniakowski's 1796 Portrait of Izabela Czartoryska, nee Fleming. Other note-worthy portraits by Wojniakowski include his portrait of Tadeusz Kościuszko. Wojniakowski also produced religious works and scenes of contemporary historic events (e.g., The Constitution of May 3, 1791, 1806). Notable as well are Wojniakowski's drawings from journeys, e.g. in Lublin Province.
Ivar Arosenius
Swedish, 1878-1909
antoine pesne
Antoine Pesne, född 23 maj 1683 i Paris, Frankrike, död 5 augusti 1757 i Berlin, Preussen, var en fransk målare under rokokon. Pesne gick i lära hos sin far, målaren Thomas Pesne, samt hos Charles de la Fosse i Paris. Under åren 1705?C1710 företog han en resa i Italien och vistades huvudsakligen i Venedig, där han anslöt sig till Andrea Celesti, vars måleri tydligt påverkade Pesnes tidiga verk. 1710 kallades han av kung Fredrik I av Preussen till Berlin som hovmålare. Därefter företog han under de följande åren kortare resor till hoven i Dessau (1715), Dresden (1718), London (1723) och Paris (1724). 1733 utnämndes Pesne till ledare för konstakademin i Berlin. Han anses vara en viktig förmedlare av den franska konsten till Brandenburg-Preussen. Pesne var i huvudsak verksam som porträttmålare, men han utförde även talrika vägg- och takmålningar för Fredrik den store i de kungliga slotten. Ett av Pesnes mest berömda konstverk är Dansösen Barbara Campanini (cirka 1745). Detta porträtt med sin lätta och schvungfulla formgivning, det spontana penseldraget och de ljusa, pastelliknande färgerna är karakteristiskt för Pesnes arbeten och för rokokon i allmänhet. På ett virtuost sätt framställer Pesne den med tygblommor dekorerade sidenklänningen. Fredrik den store uppskattade sin hovmålares berömda plein-air-porträtt och lät hänga det på en framträdande plats i sitt arbetsrum i slottet i Berlin.