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 :. | Rest on the Way | Dr.Isaac Henrique Sequeira | Diana and Actaeon (mk25) | Pfeiferauchender Bauer vor der Huttentxr | Jonathan Tyers with his daughter and son-in-law,Elizabeth and John Wood |
Related Artists:
SCOREL, Jan van
Dutch Northern Renaissance Painter, 1495-1562 North Netherlandish painter and ecclesiastic. He was one of the first north Netherlandish artists to visit Italy, and his return to Utrecht in 1524 can be regarded as a turning-point in the history of painting in the northern Netherlands. The important role Scorel played in introducing Italian art in the north was recognized even by contemporary writers and was reiterated slightly later by van Mander
Jean-Victor Schnetz
1787-1870,was a French academic painter well-regarded for his historical and genre paintings. Schnez studied in Paris under Jacques-Louis David. His works can be found at the Louvre and the Petit Palais in Paris, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, and the Museum of Fine Arts in San Francisco. In 1837 Schnetz was elected to the Academie des Beaux-Arts, and he was twice the Director of the French Academy in Rome, from 1841-1846 then again in 1853-1866
LUINI, Bernardino
Italian High Renaissance Painter, ca.1480-1532 Italian painter and draughtsman. He was one of the generation of Lombard painters active around 1500 who, influenced by Leonardo and Raphael, blended High Renaissance innovations with indigenous Milanese elements to create a Lombard Renaissance style. Luini's paintings were extremely popular with both collectors and critics from c. 1790 to the end of the 19th century. This widespread popularity, however, had unfortunate consequences: many of his frescoes were detached from their original settings, many of the panel paintings were transferred to canvas and other works were heavily restored. As a result few survive in a good state. About 700 works are attributed to Luini, but many of these attributions are over optimistic.