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 :. | Konstnarens dottrar jaggr a fjaril | Peter Darnell Muilman Charles Crokatt and William Keable in a Landscape | The Charterhouse, | Mr and Mrs William Hallett | Landscape with Peasant and Horses |
Related Artists:
Paggi, Giovanni Battista
Italian Baroque Era Painter, 1554-1627 .Italian painter and theorist. As the son of a newly inscribed nobleman, he received a Renaissance gentleman's education, but as an artist he was it seems self-taught, despite the encouragement of Luca Cambiaso. The gentleman who then set up as a painter was obliged to give his work to patrons, sometimes expecting future remuneration; but when one patron reneged on payment in 1581, Paggi mortally wounded him and was banished from Genoa. He was given protection by Francesco I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and settled in Florence. A fresco of St Catherine Converting Two Criminals (1582), painted for Niccol? Gaddi's family chapel at S Maria Novella and thoroughly Florentine in manner, established Paggi's reputation at the Medici court. He painted ephemeral decorations, portraits (all untraced) and altarpieces for many Florentine churches and for the cathedrals of San Gimignano (c. 1590), Pistoia (1591-3) and Lucca (1597-8),
FRANCIABIGIO
Italian High Renaissance Painter, 1484-1525 Italian painter. The son of a Milanese linen-weaver, he had completed his apprenticeship, in Florence, by 18 October 1504. His earliest documented works, for example a Piete (1506) for S Pancrazio, Florence, have not survived. According to Vasari, Franciabigio trained with Mariotto Albertinelli, in whose last work, the signed and dated Crucifixion (1506; Florence, Certosa del Galluzzo, Pin.), he painted the angels (Shearman). In December 1508 the names of Franciabigio and Andrea del Sarto, who sometime between autumn 1506 and 1509 set up a joint workshop, were entered in the registration book of the Arte de' Medici e Speziali, to which painters were required to belong. The Portrait of a Young Man (Paris, Louvre) dates from this period. The work, which was later enlarged, shows the subject half-length, leaning pensively against a balustrade, with strong areas of shadow around the eyes. This is the first in a series of male portraits typical of Franciabigio: the subjects, each of whom wears a hat, are mostly placed in front of a landscape, with their gaze fixed meditatively or piercingly on the onlooker. The religious works from this period, such as the Virgin and Child (1509; Rome, Pal. Barberini), also show a movement away from the style of Albertinelli and Raffaellino del Garbo and begin to reveal instead the influence of Leonardo, Michelangelo and, especially, Raphael. Yet Franciabigio's connection with Andrea del Sarto was the determining factor in his career. When in 1509 it was del Sarto who received the commission to complete the fresco cycle in the atrium of SS Annunziata, Florence, their relationship altered significantly.
haaken gullesons
Ytterlännäs parish, in the province of Ångermanland, belonged to the Archdiocese of Uppsala in the Middle Ages, but has been part of the Diocese of Härnösand since that was formed in 1647. The two churches of he parish, the old one from the early 13th century, and the new one from 1848-1854, are located between the communities of Nyland and Bollstabruk, within Kramfors Municipality. The Ytterlännäs New Church taken into use in 1854 is an example of the style known as a tegnarlada ("Tegnor barn") - spacious, white, clean, neo-classical. The Ytterlännäs Old Church (Ytterlännäs Gamla Kyrka) dates from the 1200s and features medieval vaults, wall-paintings and wooden sculptures, and baroque furnishings including the unusual feature of two galleries; the Ytterlännäs Madonna is regarded by experts as a particularly fine example of the work from the Hälsingland workshop of Haaken Gulleson, all in an excellent state of preservation thanks to the church's being abandoned after 1854.