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 Mrs Margaret Gainsborough | Portrait of Charles Wolfran Cornwall | Mr and Mrs Andrews | the blue boy | Self-Portrait |
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Lieve Verschuier
(1627-1686) was a Dutch Golden Age painter of maritime subjects. He was born in Rotterdam, and is documented in Amsterdam in 1651, where he possibly learned to paint from Simon de Vlieger. He traveled to Rome in 1653 as a young man with Jan Vermeer van Utrecht and became friends with Willem Drost and Johann Carl Loth.. On his return he settled in Rotterdam in 1667 where he remained, painting marine scenes, and Italianate landscapes. His maritime works are valued today for their historical value illustrating the art of shipbuilding in the 17th century.
siri derkert
Siri Derkert föddes i Stockholm 1888 som ett av sju barn till köpmannen Carl Edward Johansson Derkert, från 1904 endast Derkert, och Emma Charlotta Valborg, född Fogelin 1860. Hon utbildades vid Althins målarskola i Stockholm från 1904 och på Konstakademien 1911-1913. Därefter studerade hon konst i Paris på Academie Colarossi och Academie de la Grande Chaumiere tillsammans med Ninnan Santesson och Lisa Bergstrand (Elisabeth Bergstrand-Paulsson) fram till första världskrigets utbrott hösten 1914. Under och efter första världskriget vistades hon periodvis i Italien, där hennes första barn Carlo föddes. Siri Derkert studerade också vid den kvinnliga medborgarskolan som drevs av fogelstadgruppen. Till Fogelstad kom hon i september 1943 och denna vistelse inspirerade hennes konstnärskap. Hon gjorde bland annat flera skisser av de kvinnor som var verksamma på Fogelstad, däribland Honorine Hermelin och Ada Nilsson. Siri Derkert hade tre barn: sonen Carlo (1915-1994) med den finländske konstnären Valle Rosenberg (1891-1919) samt döttrarna Liv (1917-1938) och Sara (född 1920) med tecknaren och bokillustratören Bertil Lybeck (1887-1945). Med Lybeck var Siri Derkert gift mellan 1921 och 1925, men parterna levde inte tillsammans.
Ferdinand von Wright
1822-1906,Brother of Magnus von Wright and Wilhelm von Wright. He grew up under the influence of his brothers and became a skilled ornithological illustrator at a very young age. He remained in Sweden from 1837 until 1844 and worked as a draughtsman, helping his brother Wilhelm. After returning to Finland he set his sights on a career as a painter. During the second half of the 1840s he was still searching for his proper path, and he experimented with a number of subjects: birds, still-lifes, landscapes and portraits.