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 :. | A Grand Landscape | Woman in Blue | Lady innes | Miss Anne Ford (mk08) | The Fallen Tree |
Related Artists:
mattsleiderstam
Adolf Ludvig Stierneld, född den 1 september 1755 i Stockholm död den 31 juli 1835 på Gripsholm, var en svensk friherre, politiker, hovman och samlare av historiska dokument, vilken av senare historisk forskning avslöjats som en av Sveriges mest förslagna och produktiva dokumentförfalskare. Stierneld var son till Samuel Gustaf Stierneld, vilken var chef för Västmanlands regemente, och vilken lär ha antecknat sitt regemente bland den nyföddes faddrar. Sonen inskrevs även endast sex månader gammal som volontär i samma kår. Oaktat denna militärståtliga början hann sonen ej längre än till ryttmästare vid livregementet, vartill han utnämndes 1781. Inom hovet anställdes Stierneld som kammarherre hos drottning Sofia Magdalena 1778. Han kom dock snart på mindre vänlig fot med Gustav III och tillhörde vid 1786 och 1789 års riksdagar ledarna för oppositionen inom adelsståndet. När kungen beredde sig att genomföra sina envåldsplaner, hörde Stierneld till de motståndare som arresterades. Till följd av sina förbindelser med ryske ministern hade han åsamkat sig konungens synnerliga ovilja, och när de övriga arresterade frigavs, sändes Stierneld till Varbergs fästning, där han kvarhölls till 1790. Genom sitt 1790 ingångna giftermål med grevinnan Kristina Charlotta Gyldenstolpe, dotter till Gustav III:s gunstling Nils Philip Gyldenstolpe, kom Stierneld snart åter på mera vänlig fot med hovet och blev 1792 överkammarherre. Vid riksdagen 1800 sågs han också, i likhet med andra ur 1789 års opposition (Magnus Fredrik Brahe, Claes Axel Lewenhaupt med flera) i hovpartiets främsta led.
Bartolomeo Caporali
(c. 1420-c. 1505 ; active 1454-1499) was an Italian painter born and active in Perugia. He painted a Madonna and Saints (1487) for the church of Santa Maria Maddalena at Castiglione del Lago.
Ortega, Martin Rico y
Spanish, 1833-1908