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 :. | Ritt zum Markt | Portrait of Giovanna Baccelli | Detail of Cornard Wood | Portrait of Jonathan Buttall | Woman in Blue |
Related Artists:
Percy tarrant
fl.1883-1904
Miguel Ximenez
painted Saint John the Baptist; Saint Fabian and Saint Sebastian in 1494
ragnar sandberg
Ragnar Sandberg, född 16 februari 1902 i Sanne församling, Göteborgs och Bohus län, död 1972 i Stockholm, var en svensk konstnär. Ragnar Sandberg var son till August och Johanna Sandberg (född Schagerholm). Familjen flyttade till Stenungsund och där de drev en diversehandel. Sandberg studerade vid Valand för Tor Bjurström under 1920-talet. Han flyttade till Stockholm i slutet av 1940-talet och blev professor i teckning 1947 och sedermera i måleri vid Konstakademin. Sandberg ingår i den grupp av konstnärer som kallas "Göteborgskoloristerna". Sandbergs första äktenskap ingicks med Elsa Sandberg (född Karlsson). I det äktenskapet föddes en dotter. Hans andra äktenskap ingicks med Birgit Broms Sandberg, och de har en dotter.