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 :. | Portrait of Ann Ford | The Charterhouse, | Portrait of Elizabeth and Charles Bedford | The Shepherd Boy | The Maket Cart |
Related Artists:
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1150 - 80. In North America the best-known collection is probably Poor Richard's, an almanac published 1732 - 57 by Benjamin Franklin. In North America may be the most famous collection of Richard are poor, and the publication of one year from 1732 to 1757 by Benjamin Franklin.
Charles Schreiber
French 1843-1903
Frederic Yates
Frederic Yates (1854-1919) was an English painter. He gave up a business career to study painting in the Paris ateliers of Leon Bonnat, Gustave Boulanger, and Jules Joseph Lefebvre. In 1886, he moved to San Francisco where his family had settled a few years earlier. In San Francisco, he became a popular portraitist and taught at the newly formed Art Students League of San Francisco. On one of his visits to Europe, he made the acquaintance of the Dowager Marchioness of Downshire who became his patron and introduced him to London society. Yates was active in San Francisco until 1900, when he returned to England, where he lived at "Cote How" near Grasmere until 1906. During this period he painted the former United States president Woodrow Wilson and John Haden Badley. He died in 1919.