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 | Henry Duke of Cumberland (mk25) | The Honourable mas graham mars Graham was one of the many society beauties Gainsborough painted in order to make a living | Self-Portrait | Portrait of Johann Christian Fischer |
Related Artists:
ZEILLER, Jakob Johann
German painter (b. 1708, Reutte, d. 1783, Reutte) Austrian painter. Trained initially by his father, Paul Zeiller (1658-1738), he subsequently studied in Italy (1723-32) with Sebastiano Conca and at the Accademia di S Luca in Rome, and with Francesco Solimena in Naples, then at the Kaiserliche Akademie in Vienna. From 1733 to 1743 he was a regular collaborator on Paul Troger's frescoes, contributing mainly architectural frameworks painted in the style of the Bolognese quadraturisti. He retained such frameworks in his own paintings throughout his life, even in south Germany where this was generally unusual. Troger's influence on the style of Zeiller's figures and on his iconographic repertory was such that his first independent works in Austria
john keats
Born: 31 October 1795 Birthplace: Near London, England Died: 23 February 1821 (tuberculosis) Best Known As: Romantic poet who wrote "Ode to a Nightingale"
Aelbert Cuyp
1620-1691 Dutch Aelbert Cuyp Locations Painter and draughtsman, son of Jacob Cuyp. One of the most important landscape painters of 17th-century Netherlands, he combined a wide range of sources and influences, most notably in the application of lighting effects derived from Italianate painting to typical Dutch subjects. Such traditional themes as townscapes, winter scenes, cattle pieces and equestrian portraits were stylistically transformed and given new grandeur. Aelbert was virtually unknown outside his native town, and his influence in the 17th century was negligible. He became popular in the late 18th century, especially in England.