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 :. | Portrat von Mr und Mrs Andrews | Portrait of Revd Tobias Rustat | Lady Alston 4 | Portrait of Carl Friedrich Abel | Portrait of Carl Friedrich Abel |
Related Artists:
Peter Graham
painted Spate in the Highlands e1868
Spinello Aretino
Italian Early Renaissance Painter, ca.1350-1410 was an Italian painter, the son of a Florentine named Luca, who had taken refuge in Arezzo in 1310 when exiled with the rest of the Ghibelline party. Spinello was a pupil of Jacopo del Casentino, a follower of Giotto, and his own style was a sort of link between the school of Giotto and that of Siena. In the early part of his life he worked in Florence as an assistant to his master Jacopo while painting frescoes in the church of the Carmine and in Santa Maria Novella. Between 1360 and 1384 he was occupied in painting many frescoes in and near Arezzo, almost all of which have now perished. After the sack of Arezzo in 1384 Spinello returned to Florence, and in 1387-1388 with some assistants covered the walls and vault of the sacristy of San Miniato of Florence with a series of frescoes, the chief of which represent scenes from the life of Saint Benedict. These still exist, though in a sadly restored condition; they are very Giotto-like in composition, but have some of the Siena decorative brilliance of color. In 1391-1392 Spinello was painting six frescoes, which still remain on the south wall of the Pisan Campo Santo, representing miracles of St. Potitus and St. Ephesus. For these he received 270 gold forms. Among his later works the chief are the very fine series of frescoes painted in 1407-1408 on the walls and vault of a chapel in the municipal buildings of Siena; these also have suffered much from repainting, but still are the finest of Spinello's existing frescoes. Sixteen of these represent the war of Frederick Barbarossa against the republic of Venice.
Axel Haig
Swedish etcher and architectural draughtsman , 1835-1921 Swedish printmaker, painter and architect. He studied shipbuilding in Karlskrona from 1850 to 1856. The following year he joined the shipbuilders Lawrence Hill & Co. in Glasgow, but soon left to study architecture in London, where he worked with the English architect Ewan Christian (1814-95) and with William Burges. Under the influence of Burges he became especially interested in Gothic architecture. In the late 1870s he began etching, with the intention of illustrating a book on Scotland's medieval architecture. Haig contributed illustrations to numerous English magazines, including The Architect. (For Haig's drawing of William Burges's competition entry for the Law Courts, London) In 1882 he was awarded a medal for his etchings at the Paris Salon and elected an honorary member of the Swedish Royal Academy.