1829-1905
French
Jean Jacques Henner Galleries
French painter. He was born into a peasant family in the Sundgau and received his first artistic training at Altkirch with Charles Goutzwiller (1810-1900) and later in Strasbourg in the studio of Gabriel-Christophe Gu?rin (1790-1846). In 1846 he enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris as a pupil of Michel-Martin Drolling and, from 1851, of Francois-Edouard Picot. While a student he was particularly drawn to portraiture, and during his frequent visits to Alsace he made portraits of his family as well as of the notables of the region. He also painted scenes of Alsatian peasant life. Related Paintings of Jean-Jacques Henner :. | Portrait of a Young Girl with a Bow in Her Hair | Jesus au tombe | A Red Haired Beauty | Pierre Corneille | Woman Reading | Related Artists:
BOTTICINI, FrancescoItalian Early Renaissance Painter, ca.1446-1498
Francesco di Giovanni Botticini (1446 ?C July 22, 1498) was an Italian Early Renaissance painter. He studied under Cosimo Rosselli and Andrea del Verrocchio. He was born in Florence in 1446 and is mostly remembered for his painting entitled "Assumption of the Virgin"; he died in 1498 (some sources say 1497). He established his own workshop after a brief period as Neri di Bicci's assistant; the shop was renowned for its decorative works, a few of which can be seen in the cloistered church of Empoli. Some of Botticini's works are said to be overshadowed by his Florentine contemporaries, such as Filippino Lippi and Botticelli, who often influenced Botticini's works.
Thomas Gainsborough1727-1788
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.
Walter Granville SmithIllustrator and Painter
American
1870-1938