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 :. | Thomas Graham | Mr and Mrs Andrews | Chasing a Butterfly | Bumper,a Bull Terrier | Grace Elliott |
Related Artists:
James Wilson Morrice
(August 10, 1865 Montreal - January 23, 1924 Tunis) was a significant Canadian landscape painter. He studied at the Academie Julian in Paris, France, where he lived for most of his career. Morrice was the son of a wealthy merchant, and studied law in Toronto from 1882 to 1889. In 1890 he left to study painting in England. The next year he arrived in Paris, where he studied at the Academie Julian from 1892-7. At Julians he befriended Charles Conder and Maurice Prendergast, and also met Robert Henri. Morrice continued to live in Paris until the First World War, although he spent most of his winters in Canada. He made many connections in the intellectual circles of Paris, while also remaining in touch with the Canadian art world:
PARENZANO, Bernardino
Italian painter, Paduan school (b. ca. 1450, Parenzo, d. ca. 1500, Vicenza).
heinrich hansen
Heinrich Hansen (13 October 1861 ?C 17 April 1940) was a German Lutheran theologian and the father of the Lutheran High Church movement in Germany. Hansen was born in Klockries near Lindholm (Nordfriesland) as a son of a teacher. In Kiel and Erlangen he studied theology, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic and in particular the Old Testament under August Klostermann. He worked since 1887 as a pastor in Schleswig-Holstein: in Reinfeld, Lindholm, on the island Pellworm, in Kropp and in Olderup near Husum. Hansen wrote Latin hymns and worked on a Low German Bible translation and published a Low German hymnal. By the study of the old Lutheran theologians, particularly Martin Chemnitz, and the Roman Catholic theologian Johann Adam Möhler, he came to an Evangelical Catholic view about church. In the Reformation jubilee year of 1917??exactly 100 years after Claus Harms?? Hansen published 95 theses (Stimuli et Clavi) in Latin and German, as a sharp criticism against contemporary Protestantism. His theses influenced the foundation of "Hochkirchliche Vereinigung" in October 1918. Hansen is well-known as a co-founder and the first chairman of Hochkirchliche Vereinigung. He died in Breklum