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, c. | Portrait of John Campbell | Count Rumford | Woman in Blue | Detail of Portrait of Mr and Mrs Andrews |
Related Artists:
Richard Parkes Bonington
1802-1828 Richard Parkes Bonington Locations English painter. His father, also called Richard (1768-1835), was a provincial drawing-master and painter, exhibiting at the Royal Academy and the Liverpool Academy between 1797 and 1811. An entrepreneur, he used his experience of the Nottingham lace-manufacturing industry to export machinery illegally to Calais, setting up a business there in late 1817 or early 1818. In Calais the young Richard Parkes Bonington became acquainted with Louis Francia, with whom he consolidated and expanded whatever knowledge of watercolour technique he had brought with him from England. Under Francias direction Bonington left Calais for Paris where, probably not before mid- or late 1818, he met Eugene Delacroix. The latters recollection of Bonington at this time was of a tall adolescent who revealed an astonishing aptitude in his watercolour copies of Flemish landscapes. Once in Paris Bonington embarked on an energetic and successful career, primarily as a watercolourist. In this he was supported by his parents who sometime before 1821 also moved to Paris, providing a business address for him at their lace company premises.
J.L.Clark
British 19th c
Simon de Vlieger
Dutch 1600-1653 Dutch painter, draughtsman, etcher and stained-glass designer. He was one of the leading marine and landscape artists of the Dutch school and decisively influenced the direction of Dutch marine art during the 1630s and 1640s. His late works anticipated the shift from the monochrome or tonal phase of Dutch marine art to the more classical style of Jan van de Cappelle and Willem van de Velde the younger (see MARINE PAINTING). Although de Vlieger reputation rests chiefly on his marine paintings, he was also a notable draughtsman and etcher.