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 :. | The Honorable Mrs Graham | the blue boy | Dorfmadchen mit Hund und Henkelkrug | Portrait of James Christie | Prince Edward Later Duke of Kent (mk25 |
Related Artists:
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Albert Besnard
1849-1934 French Albert Besnard Art Locations (b Paris, 2 June 1849; d Paris, 4 Dec 1936). French painter, printmaker and designer. He was born to an artistic family and was precociously talented. In 1866 he entered the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he studied under Jean Franois Brmond (1807-68) and Alexandre Cabanel. His Salon dbut in 1868 and his subsequent entries were well received, and in 1874 he won the Prix de Rome with the Death of Timophanes, Tyrant of Corinth (Paris, Ecole N. Sup. B.-A.). Remaining in Italy for five years, Besnard worked in an academic style influenced by Pietro da Cortona and Michelangelo.
Ludwig Emil Grimm
1790-1863,German draughtsman, engraver and painter. He was a brother of the philologists and fairy-tale collectors Jakob Grimm (1785-1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786-1859). He attended the Kunstakademie in Kassel from 1805 to 1807. He then moved to Munich to study with the engraver Carl Ernst Hess (1755-1828), and he became a student at the Akademie der Bildenden Kenste there. He revealed a talent for portraiture in numerous sketches of his family and friends. In 1814 he served with the Prussian army in the military campaign against France, then completed his studies in Munich. In 1816 he visited Italy,