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 :. | Ox Cart by the Bands of a Navigable River | Portrat von Molly und Peggy mit Zeichenutensilien | Dorfmadchen mit Hund und Henkelkrug | The Honorable Mrs Graham | Study for a Foreground,a Bank with Weeds and Thistles |
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Leon Cogniet
French Academic Painter, 1794-1880,was a French painter. Cogniet was born in Paris. In 1812, he entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he studied under Pierre-Narcisse Guerin at the same time as Delacroix and Gericault. He was a resident at the Villa Medici, in Rome, from 1817 to 1822. A romantic painter, his main subjects were history and portraits, and in 1817 he won the Prix de Rome. He died in Paris in 1880.
Lucas van Leyden
1489-1533 Dutch Lucas van Leyden Galleries Lucas van Leyden (Leiden, 1494 ?C August 8, 1533 in Leiden), also named either Lucas Hugensz or Lucas Jacobsz, was a Dutch engraver and painter, born and mainly active in Leiden, who was among the first Dutch exponents of genre painting and is generally regarded as one of the finest engravers in the history of art. He was the pupil of his father, from whose hand no works are known, and of Cornelis Engelbrechtsz, but both of these were painters whereas Lucas himself was principally an engraver. Where he learnt engraving is unknown, but he was highly skilled in that art at a very early age: the earliest known print by him (Mohammed and the Murdered Monk) dates from 1508, when he was perhaps only 14, yet reveals no trace of immaturity in inspiration or technique. Lot and his daughters (ca. 1509)In 1514 he entered the Painters' Guild at Leiden. He seems to have travelled a certain amount, and visits are recorded to Antwerp in 1521, the year of D??rer's Netherlandish journey, and to Middelburg in 1527, when he met Jan Mabuse. An unbroken series of dated engravings makes it possible to follow his career as a print-maker and to date many of his paintings, but no clear pattern of stylistic development emerges. D??rer was the single greatest influence on him, but Lucas was less intellectual in his approach, tending to concentrate on the anecdotal features of the subject and to take delight in caricatures and genre motifs. Carel van Mander characterizes Lucas as a pleasure-loving dilettante, who sometimes worked in bed, but he left a large oeuvre, in spite of his fairly early death, and must have been a prodigious worker. Lucas had a great reputation in his day (Vasari even rated him above D??rer) and is universally regarded as one of the greatest figures in the history of graphic art (he made etchings and woodcuts as well as engravings and was a prolific draughtsman). His status as a painter is less elevated, but he was undoubtedly one of the outstanding Netherlandish painters of his period. He was a pioneer of the Netherlandish genre tradition, as witness his Chess Players (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin) which actually represents a variant game called 'courier' - and his Card Players (National Gallery of Art, Washington), while his celebrated Last Judgement triptych (Lakenhal Museum, Leiden, 1526-27) shows the heights to which he could rise as a religious painter. It eloquently displays his vivid imaginative powers, his marvellous skill as a colourist and his deft and fluid brushwork.
Emilio Magistretti
(Milan, 1851 - 1936) was an Italian painter. Magistretti studied at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts from 1871 to 1875 under the guidance of Francesco Hayez and then accompanied him on his Italian journey of 1879. He worked initially in a range of different areas, from genre scenes to religious subjects and perspective painting, and successfully tried his hand at painting portraits, animals and landscapes at the turn of the century. He began to establish his reputation as an artist in 1880, when he was awarded a prize by the Ministry of Education, and became well known as a painter of moderately naturalistic portraits particularly appreciated by the middle-class establishment. An autobiography richly illustrated with reproductions of his most celebrated works was published in 1926.