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 three Eldest Princesses | Der Morgenspaziergang | miss haverfield, c | Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire | Mr and Mrs Andrews |
Related Artists:
Charles Turner
English Painter, ca.1773-1857
Georg Emanuel Opiz
1775 - 1841
Alexey Bogolyubov
16 March 1824 - 3 February 1896) was a Russian landscape painter. Bogolyubov was born in the Pomeranian village of Novgorod Gubernia. His father was retired colonel Pyotr Gavriilovich Bogolyubov. Bogolyubov's maternal grandfather was the well-known philosopher and social critic Alexander Radishchev. In 1841, Alexey graduated from military school, serving in the Russian Navy and travelling with the fleet to many countries. In 1849, he started to attend classes of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Arts, where he studied under Maxim Vorobiev. The young painter was greatly influenced by Ivan Ayvazovsky. In 1853, he finished the Academy with a major Gold medal. He retired as a navy officer and was appointed an artist to the Navy headquarters. From 1854 to 1860, he travelled around Europe and worked prolifically. In Rome, he was acquainted with Alexander Ivanov, who convinced Bogolyubov to focus more on drawing. In Desseldorf, Bogolyubov took classes from the painter Andreas Achenbach. In Paris, he admired the artists of the Barbizon School. French painters Camille Corot and Charles François Daubigny were good friends and collaborators with Bogolyubov. Bogolyubov returned to Russia in 1860. He exhibited his works in the Academy and received the title of professor. For some time, he taught in the Academy. In the 1860s, he traveled along the Volga. His paintings lost all traces of Romanticism, replacing that element with staunch realism of the natural. In 1871 he was elected to the Imperial Academy of Arts. Sailing ships, 1860From 1870, he became close to the The Wanderers art movement, participated in all their exhibitions. He became a member of their board. Much older than most of the other members of the movement, he had reservations on their social ideas. In 1873, Bogolyubov left the ? in solidarity with his fellow Itinerants. He even tried to create an alternative Russian Academy of Arts in Rome.