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 | Portrait of a Young Woman | Mr and Mrs. Andrews | Portrait of the Queen Charlotte | Self-Portrait |
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Garneray Ambroise
French Artist , Paris 1783-1857 French corsair, painter and writer. He served under Robert Surcouf and Jean-Marie Dutertre, and was held prisoner by the British for eight years. Garneray was born in Paris (on Rue Saint-Andre-des-arts, in the Latin Quarter) on February 9, 1783. He was the elder son of Jean-Francois Garneray (1755 - 1837), painter of the king, who was pupil of Jacques-Louis David. At thirteen, he joined the Navy as a seaman, encouraged by his cousin, Beaulieu-Leloup, commander of the frigate Forte ("the Stout one"). Garneray sailed from Rochefort to the Indian Ocean with the frigate division under Sercey, to which the Forte belonged. Garneray took part in the various campaigns of Sercey division and witnessed the hardship it met in the battle against Arrogant and Victorious. He then served in 1798 on the corvette Brule Gueule ("Mouth burner"), which patrolled with the frigate Preneuse ("the Taker"). Returning from this campaign, the Brule Gueule and Preneuse were chased by a British squadron comprising two ships of the line, one frigate and one corvette; the French flew into a creek near Black River whose shallow waters prevented the British from pursuing. The next day, the British squadron attacked; the French had established strong defensive positions by installing the unusable batteries of their ships ashore, and repelled the British squadron. In 1799,
Alexei Korzukhin
(1835-1894) was Russian painter. A Korzukhin 000.JPG Korzukhin was born in Yekaterinburg on March 23, 1835. In 1858 he began his studies in the St. Petersburg in the Imperial Academy of Arts. In 1860, Korzukhin won his first award for the painting his The Drunken Father. In 1864, he help found Petersburg Artel of Artists - the "Revolt of Fourteen". Korzukhin has received a rank of the artist of the First Degree for his painting Commemoration on a Rural Cemetery (1865). For The Return of the Father from Fair, he received a rank of the academician. In 1870, he became a founding member of the art group 'The Wanderers. In 1891 he painted The Lord's Supper for a cathedral in Riga. Korzukhin is perhaps most famous for his many portraits, each of which is characterized to have a subtle psychological depth. For this reason they are generally accepted as masterpieces of Russian portrait painting. Alexei Korzukhin died in St. Petersburg on October 30, 1894.