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 The Hon,Richard Savage Nassau | Landschaft mit dem Dorfe Cornard | Gainsborough | Der Morgenspaziergang | Detail of Portrait of artist-s Wife |
Related Artists:
Pjotr Michalovski
1800-1855
Ralph Eleaser Whiteside Earl
(1785-8 - Nashville, Tennessee, September 16, 1838), also known as Ralph E. W. Earl or Ralph Eleazer Whiteside Earl, was an American painter known as the "court painter" to President Andrew Jackson. Earl was the son of portrait painter Ralph Earl and his second wife Ann Whiteside. He was born c. 1785-88, probably in New York City, and likely received his early training in portraiture from his father, whose naive style is reflected in the younger Earl's earliest works. He traveled to London in 1809, where he studied for a year with John Trumbull and was advised by Benjamin West, learning perspective, anatomy, and three-dimensional illusion. He remained in England until 1814, living with his maternal grandfather and uncle in Norwich and executing portrait commissions. He then traveled to Paris before returning to the United States in December 1815 with the intention of creating grand-scale history paintings on the European model. As preparation for a planned project depicting the Battle of New Orleans, Earl met General Andrew Jackson and visited him at his Tennessee home, The Hermitage, in January 1817. Earl painted portraits of Jackson and his family, and married Mrs. Jackson's niece Jane Caffery on 19 May 1819. She died in childbirth in 1820.
MANDER, Karel van
b. 1548, Meulebeke, d. 1606, Amsterdam Dutch painter, poet, and writer. Born of a noble family, after much wandering he settled in Haarlem in 1583 and founded a successful academy of painting with Hendrik Goltzius and Cornelis Cornelisz (1562 C 1638). He is best known for The Book of Painters (1604), which contains about 175 biographies of Dutch, Flemish, and German painters of the 15th C 16th centuries; it became for the northern countries what Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Painters had been for Italy.