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 Lownds Stone | Ox Cart by the Bands of a Navigable River | Mrs Richard Brinsley Sheridan | Isabella,Viscountess Molyneux | Detail of Portrait of Mr and Mrs Andrews |
Related Artists:
Vincenzo Campi
Vincenzo Campi (c. 1536 - 1591) was an Italian painter of the Renaissance from Cremona. His style merges Lombard with Mannerist styles, however, unlike his siblings, he is known for a series of canvases, mostly painted after 1570s [1], displaying genre scenes and local produce. Many set at a food store front of some sort. At the time, this type of paintings were uncommon in Italy, and more common in Netherlands, as exemplified by the canvases of Joachim Beuckelaer. In Cremona, his extended family was the main artistic studio of his time. Giulio Campi and Antonio Campi were reportedly half-brothers, while Bernardino Campi was a distant relative. All were active and prominent local painters. In 1586-1589, he and his brother Antonio completed paintings for the church of San Paolo Converso in Milan.
Theophile Hamel
(8 November 1817 - 23 December 1870) was a Canadian artist who painted mainly portraits and religious images in 19th-century Quebec. Hamel was born in 1817 in Sainte-Foy (that was a suburb of Quebec City), the son of a successful farmer. Hamel's paternal ancestry can be traced to French immigrant Jean Hamel, who arrived in New France from Avremesnil (Normandy) in 1656. In 1834 Theophile was already taking art lessons from Antoine Plamondon. His early portraits show a mixture of European romanticism and Canadian simplicity. His style gradually changed to match the taste of his clients for simple, honest, even prim portraits
Jean Hey
Flemish Northern Renaissance Painter, active 1480-1500 Until the late 20th century, the name of the painter of the Moulins Triptych was unknown, although art historians identified a number of other works that were evidently by the same hand. The first monograph on the Master of Moulins, written in 1961 by Madeleine Huillet d'Istria, argued that this artist did not actually exist, and that more than 12 different artists were responsible for the corpus of works traditionally ascribed to him. The Master's identity was established after an inscription was found on the reverse of a damaged painting, Christ with Crown of Thorns (1494) in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels, identifying the artist as Jean Hey, teutonicus and pictor egregius ("the famous painter"), and identifying the patron as Jean Cueillette, who was secretary to the King and an associate of the Bourbon family.Stylistic similarities link this painting to the works attributed to the Master of Moulins. The Master of Moulins appears to have been the court painter for the Bourbons, and from a surviving account for 1502-03, it is clear that the court painter's name was Jean; other candidates once considered plausible, such as Jean Perreal and Jean Prevost, have proven untenable in the light of subsequent research. The term "Teutonicus", or "German" included Flemings at this date.