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 :. | Cottage Girl with Dog and pitcher | Mrs Grace Elliot | Portrait of Mr and Mrs Carter of Bullingdon House | Dr.Isaac Henrique Sequeira | The Mall in St.James-s Park |
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William Ritschel
1864-1949 William Frederic Ritschel (1864-1949) was an impressionist painter who was born in Nuremberg, Germany on July 11, 1864. As a youth, he worked as a sailor and began sketching seascapes. He studied art under Karl Raupp (1837-1918) and Wilhelm von Kaulbach (1805-1874) at the Royal Academy in Munich before immigrating to New York City in 1895. In 1911, he settled in Carmel-by-the-Sea, California and began painting Monterey Peninsula. He died in Carmel in 1949. The Arizona State University Art Museum (Tempe, Arizona), the Art Institute of Chicago, the Crocker Art Museum (Monterey, California), the Davenport Museum of Art (Davenport, Iawa), Fisher Gallery (University of Southern California, Los Angeles), the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the Irvine Museum (Irvine, California), the Monterey Museum of Art (Monterey, California), the Museum of Art at Brigham Young University (Provo, Utah), the Newark Museum (Newark, New Jersey), the Oakland Museum of California (Oakland, California), the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (Philadelphia), the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D. C.), Springville Museum of Art (Springville, Utah), and the University of Arizona Museum of Art (Tucson, Arizona) are among the public collections holding works by William Frederic Ritschel
ROBERT, Hubert
French Rococo Era Painter, 1733-1808 French painter, draughtsman, etcher and landscape designer. He was one of the most prolific and engaging landscape painters in 18th-century France. He specialized in architectural scenes in which topographical elements derived from the buildings and monuments of ancient and modern Italy and of France are combined in often fantastic settings or fictitious juxtapositions. The fluid touch and rich impasto employed in his paintings
Umberto Boccioni
1882-1916 Italian Umberto Boccioni Locations Italian sculptor, painter, printmaker and writer. As one of the principal figures of FUTURISM, he helped shape the movements revolutionary aesthetic as a theorist as well as through his art. In spite of the brevity of his life, his concern with dynamism of form and with the breakdown of solid mass in his sculpture continued to influence other artists long after his death.