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 :. | Self-Portrait | Ritt zum Markt | Portrait of Carl Friedrich Abel | Portrait of the Composer Carl Friedrich Abel with his Viola da Gamba | Mrs Richard Brinsley Sheridan |
Related Artists:
Francken, Frans II
b. 1581, Antwerpen, d. 1642, Antwerpen Painter, son of Frans Francken I. Of all the members of the Francken family, Frans II is the most important and still the most widely known. There are paintings by him in all large public collections in Europe. Besides altarpieces and painted furniture panels, he produced mainly small cabinet pictures with historical, mythological or allegorical themes. Frans II's rank as an artist is not so much derived from his extensive output as from his innovative subject-matter: his depictions of luxuriously decorated Kunstkammern and art galleries
Levitan, Isaak
Russian Painter, 1860-1900 Russian painter of Lithuanian birth. He largely painted landscapes (including pastel sketches), which are noted for their emotive or symbolic resonance. His 'landscapes of mood' had a profound influence on Russian landscape painting, to which he introduced a sense of the unity of humankind and nature, and of the spiritual power of the Russian
Charles M Russell
American Painter, 1864-1926 American painter and sculptor. In 1880 he left his upper-class home in St Louis for Montana Territory. He worked briefly on a sheep ranch, spent two years as a hunter's and trapper's assistant and then became a cowboy. During his considerable spare daytime hours he painted, sketched and modelled small animal figures in clay (e.g. Antelope, 1915; Fort Worth, TX, Amon Carter Mus.). Although he painted a few exceptional oils and watercolours prior to 1900, the vast majority of his best work was done in the last two decades of his life. Typically the subject-matter centres around cowboy life (e.g. Wagon Boss, 1909; Tulsa, OK, Gilcrease Inst. Amer. Hist. & A.) and the Plains Indians, for whom he had great respect. The luminous Piegans (1918; Denver, CO, Mus. W. A.), with its depiction of the Plains Indians, is a reminder of the vastness of the American West. Russell's sense of humour and empathy for his subject-matter radiates from his paintings as pleasingly as do the clear colours of the high country. His bronze sculptures (e.g. Buffalo Hunt, 1905; Denver, CO, Mus. W. A.) depict the same dramatic and tension-packed themes as his paintings.