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 :. | Prince Edward Later Duke of Kent (mk25 | Portrait of Carl Friedrich Abel | The Honourable mas graham mars Graham was one of the many society beauties Gainsborough painted in order to make a living | Portrait of Carl Friedrich Abel | Mr. and Mr.s Andrews |
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Henry Richard S. Bunnett
1845 -1910 David Ross McCord (1844-1930) commissioned Henry Richard S. Bunnett (1845-1910) to paint over 200 oil paintings between 1885 and 1889. The works depicted buildings, views and places around Quebec that McCord felt were of historical importance.
Johann Jakob Meyer
b Winterthur, 7 Oct 1763; d Aussersihl, Schwyz, 10 April 1830,Swiss painter and engraver. He studied under Johann Rudolf Schellenburg in Winterthur and then, in 1778, with Heinrich Rieter (1751-1818) in Berne, where he was also influenced by the topographical landscapes of Johann Ludwig Aberli. He was adept at executing such sharply detailed engravings of Swiss cities as View of Lucerne (c. 1790; e.g. Lucerne, Zentbib.), which he sold to tourists. In 1802 he published an important series of views of Switzerland, which were widely circulated. His skill as a painter of animals was sometimes combined with his rendering of the landscape, as in View of the Lake of Bienne (c. 1800; Winterthur, Kstmus.). In 1807 he taught drawing in Basle and in 1814 was active in the area around Lake Constance. His paintings are often characterized by warm colours and frequently capture the atmosphere of late afternoon, as in Murg on the Lake of Walen (c. 1820; St Gall, Kstmus.). Many of his landscapes are straightforward depictions of the Swiss countryside, stressing the romantic nature of the scene, as in View of the Area of Bex (1821; Winterthur, Kstmus.). He painted in Zurich in 1827 and was known to have travelled to Munich and Dresden. His works are important visual documents of an image of the pastoral countryside frequently propagated by Swiss artists in accordance with the philosophical ideals of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
CAROSELLI, Angelo
Italian painter, Roman school (b. 1585, Roma, d. 1652, Roma) Italian painter. He was the son of a dealer in second-hand goods and taught himself to paint. According to Baldinucci, he knew Caravaggio, who fled Rome in 1606, and this association may have encouraged his decision to become a painter. After visits to Florence (1605) and Naples (1613), Caroselli settled in Rome, where, in 1615, he married a Sicilian, Maria Zurca. His weakness for beautiful women was notorious (Baldinucci; Passeri). His second marriage, to Brigitta Lauri, daughter of the Flemish painter Balthasar Lauwers or Lauri (1578-1645),