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 :. | A Coastal Landscape | Mr and Mrs William Hallett | The Harvest Wagon | Portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire | Jonathan Tyers with his daughter and son-in-law,Elizabeth and John Wood |
Related Artists:
PRETI, Mattia
Italian Baroque Era Painter, 1613-1699 Italian painter and draughtsman. Although he was trained and had his first success as a painter in Rome during the 1630s and 1640s, he is traditionally associated with the Neapolitan school. It was in Naples between 1653 and 1660 that he made his most lasting mark (see fig. 1), contributing to the evolution of the exuberant late Baroque style and providing an important source of inspiration to later generations of painters, notably to Francesco Solimena. From 1661 he was based in Malta, where his most substantial undertaking was the decoration of St John's, Valletta. Preti's mature style is intensely dramatic and unites a Caravaggesque realism and expressive chiaroscuro with the grandeur and theatricality of Venetian High Renaissance painting.
RECCO, Giuseppe
Italian Baroque Era Painter, 1634-1695 Son of Giacomo Recco. He was the most celebrated Neapolitan still-life painter of his day. He began in the tradition of his father and (probable) uncle Giovan Battista Recco, painting naturalistic arrangements of flowers, fish, game and kitchen scenes. There are many signed and dated works which chart the development of his style. The Bodeg?n with a Negro and Musical Instruments (1659; Madrid, Medibacoeli priv. col.), the Bodeg?n with Fish (1664; Paris, Moret priv. col.) and the Kitchen Interior (1675; Vienna, Ksthist. Mus.) are close to the art of Giovan Battista Recco. The fish and kitchen still-lifes are typically Neapolitan, yet Giuseppe's art is distinguished by the intensity with which he observes light and surface texture and by the clarity of the composition, based on a careful balance of horizontals and verticals. He moved toward a more Baroque and decorative style, and the unfinished Still-life with Fruit, Flowers and Birds (1672) and the Still-life with Fruit and Flowers
FROMENT, Nicolas
French Early Renaissance Painter, ca.1430-1485