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 :. | Conversation in a Park | Mrs.Grace Dalrymply Elliott | Heneage Lloyd and His Sister | The Painter's Daughters Chasing a Butterfly | Landscape with a Woodcutter cowrting a Milkmaid |
Related Artists:
Joseph Caraoud
French 1821-1905
dahlstrom
1806-1869
Ulrich Hubner
(17 June 1872 Berlin - 29 April 1932 Neubabelsberg) was a German painter. He was born into a family of artists, his academic training he received in 1892 in Karlsruhe with Robert Poetzelberger, Gustav Schönleber, and Carlos Grethe. He then studied at the private art school in Munich Friedrich Fehr. In 1899, he was a member of the Berlin Secession, and in 1906 and 1907 was on the board. In 1899, he won the prize for advertising designs for cooperative advertising by Ludwig and Otto Stollwerck Henkell. He painted in Berlin, Havel, and in the summers in Hamburg, Lebeck, Rostock and Travemende (where he had his principal residence from 1909 to 1912), and in particular, many harbor scenes. He showed at Kunstverein in Hamburg in 1910. Some of his works are in the Behnhaus Museum, in Lebeck, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art.