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 :. | Gainsborough | Portrait of Mrs | Countess Howe | Portrait of Carl Friedrich Abel German composer | Portrait of Uvedale Tomkins Price |
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Adriaen Brouwer
(1605 - January 1638) was a Flemish genre painter active in Flanders and the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century. At a young age Brouwer, probably born as Adriaen de Brauwer in Oudenaarde, moved perhaps via Antwerp to Haarlem, where he became a student of Frans Hals alongside Adriaen van Ostade. He also was active in stage acting and poetry. He stayed in Haarlem and Amsterdam until 1631, when he moved back to Antwerp in the Spanish Netherlands. There, he became a member of the Guild of St. Luke in 1631-1632, as well as the rhetoricians's chamber De Violieren. Tradition has it that Brouwer himself spent much time in the alehouses of Flanders and Holland. His works are typically detailed and small, and often adopt themes of debauchery, drunkenness and foolishness in order to explore human emotions, expressions and responses to pain, fear and the senses. The Bitter Tonic is an example of the type of work that depicts such responses, in this case the sense of taste. His work was well liked, to the point that forgeries were sold in his own time. Both Rubens and Rembrandt owned a number of his works. Nevertheless, Brouwer appeared in financial trouble throughout his life. He died at the early age of 32 in Antwerp, where he was first buried in a common grave.
Robert Scott Lauder
Robert Scott Lauder (25 June 1803 - 21 April 1869) was a Scottish mid-Victorian artist who described himself as a "historical painter". He was one of the original members of the Royal Scottish Academy. Lauder was born at Silvermills, Edinburgh, on 25 June 1803, the third son of John Lauder of Silvermills (died 1838), Burgess of Edinburgh and proprietor of the tannery at Silvermills, by his wife Helen Tait (d.1850). After attending the Royal High School he went to London, where his eldest brother William was engaged in the family business. He returned to Edinburgh about 1826 and was elected one of the original members of the Royal Scottish Academy in 1830. On 9 September 1833 at St.Cuthberts in Edinburgh he married Isabella Ramsay Thomson and they then went abroad, accompanied by his younger artist-brother, James Eckford Lauder. Robert studied for some years in Rome, Florence, Bologna, Venice and Munich. Lauder returned to London in 1838 where he lived for several years, where his three children - Isabella, John, and Robert, were baptised at St.Thomases Church, Southwark, in 1840, 1841, and 1844. Whilst in London he exhibited at the Royal Academy and competed in the Westminster Hall competition of 1847, sending his Christ walking on the Sea, which was subsequently purchased by Lady Angela Burdett-Coutts, 1st Baroness Burdett-Coutts. He became the first president of the short-lived National Institution of Fine Arts and also exhibited there. He later removed back to Edinburgh in 1849 where both his sons - Robert Scott Lauder (born 1844), who became a physician, and John Thomson Lauder (1841-1865) - attended the Edinburgh Academy. Sir Walter Scott's novels provided him with subjects for many of his most successful historical paintings. About 1860 he suffered a paralytic stroke and did not practice after 1861. He died at Edinburgh from a bout of bronchitis on 21 April 1869, still paralysed. He is buried in Warriston Cemetery in Edinburgh.
Bafcop Alexis
Flemish , 1804-1895