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 :. | Portrait of Edward Ligonier, 1st Earl Ligonier | Portrait of Hon.Charles Hamilton | Portrat der Mrs Richard B Sheridan | Miss Anne Ford | Mr and Mrs Andrews (nn03) |
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SCHEDONI, Bartolomeo
Italian painter, Emilian school (b. 1578, Modena, d. 1615, Parma) Italian painter and draughtsman. He was the son of Giulio Schedoni, a mask-maker, who served the Este court in Modena and the Farnese in Parma; in 1598 Schedoni and his father are recorded as residing in Parma, both serving the court. In 1595 Ranuccio I, Duke of Parma, sent Bartolomeo to Rome, to train in the studio of Federico Zuccaro. Schedoni fell ill shortly after, however, and returned to Parma. His earliest surviving works show no evidence of Roman influence. The matter of Schedoni's training remains somewhat problematic. Carlo Cesare Malvasia claimed that he was a pupil of Annibale Carracci in Bologna, but there are reasons to doubt this. First, this would have been prior to Annibale's departure for Rome in 1595, a period when Schedoni was still apparently under his father's jurisdiction. Secondly, the early pictures indicate that initially his style was formed primarily by studying the work of Correggio in Parma. To a lesser degree he was influenced by the Parmesan culture of Parmigianino, Girolamo Mazzola Bedoli and Michelangelo Anselmi. As a boy in Parma he was also known to have frequented the studio of the Fleming Giovanni Sons (1547/8-1611).
Maurin, Charles
French, 1856-1914 was a French painter who practised a variety of styles. A notable symbolist work of his being Maternity, a study of motherhood. He was a friend of the painter Felix Vallotton.
Frederick Smallfield
British Painter and Etcher , (1829-1911)