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 :. | An Extensive River Landscape with Cattle and a Drover and Sailing Boats in the distance | Portrait of Grace Elliott | Portrait of James Christie | Miss Anne Ford (mk08) | Detail of Landscape with a Woodcutter courting a Milkmaid |
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George Benjamin Luks
(August 13, 1867-October 29, 1933) was an American realist artist and illustrator. His vigorously painted genre paintings of urban subjects are examples of the Ashcan school in American art. Luks was born in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, to Central European immigrants. His father was a physician and his mother was an amateur painter and musician.The Luks family (George, his parents and five siblings) eventually moved to Pottsville, in Southern Pennsylvania near the coal fields. In this setting, he learned at a young age the importance of compassion by watching how his parents helped the coal miners' families, and many believe that this is the reason why lower class New Yorkers were often Luks's subject matter. Luks studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts before he traveled though Europe where he attended several art schools. Later he went to Desseldorf where he lived with a distant relative, a retired lion-tamer. He abandoned Desseldorf for the more stimulating spheres of London and Paris. He then returned to Philadelphia in 1893 where he was an illustrator for the Philadelphia Press where he met John Sloan, William Glackens, and Everett Shinn. They would meet at the studio of Robert Henri, an artist who emphasized the depiction of ordinary life, shunning genteel subjects and painting quickly. The group became known as the "Philadelphia Five". In 1896, Luks moved to New York and began his art career there as the premier humorist artist for the New York World. During his time as an illustrator there, he lived with William Glackens.
Vasily Vereshchagin
(Russian: October 26, 1842 - April 13, 1904) was one of the most famous Russian battle painters and one of the first Russian artists to be widely recognized abroad. The graphic nature of his realist scenes led many of them to never be printed or exhibited. Vereshchagin was born at Cherepovets, Novgorod Governorate, Russia in 1842 as the middle of three brothers. His father was a landowner of noble birth. When he was eight years old he was sent to Tsarskoe Selo to enter the Alexander Cadet Corps, and three years later he entered the Sea Cadet Corps at St Petersburg, making his first voyage in 1858. He served on the frigate Kamchatka, which sailed to Denmark, France and Egypt. Vereshchagin graduated first in the list at the naval school, but left the service immediately to begin the study of drawing in earnest. He won a medal two years later, in 1863, from the St Petersburg Academy for his Ulysses Slaying the Suitors.