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 :. | Dr.Isaac Henrique Sequeira | miss haverfield, c | Portrait of Sarah Kirby and John Joshua Kirby | Mrs. Siddons | Portrait of The Hon,Richard Savage Nassau |
Related Artists:
BOEL, Pieter
Flemish Baroque Era Painter, 1622-1674 Flemish painter, draughtsman and etcher. He came from an artistic family: his father Jan Boel (1592-1640), was an engraver, publisher and art dealer; his uncle Quirin Boel I was an engraver; and his brother Quirin Boel II (1620-40) was also a printmaker. Pieter was probably apprenticed in Antwerp to Jan Fyt, but may have studied previously with Frans Snyders. He then went to Italy, probably visiting Rome and Genoa, where he is supposed to have stayed with Cornelis de Wael. None of Boel's work from this period is known. In 1650 he became a master in the Antwerp Guild of St Luke (having given his first name as Jan, not Pieter). His marriage to Maria Blanckaert took place at about the same time. Boel dated only a few of his paintings, making it difficult to establish a chronology. He is best known for his hunting scenes, some of which clearly show his debt to Snyders, but the dominant influence on his work was that of Fyt, particularly evident in his emphatic brushwork. However, Boel was more restrained both in his treatment and in his handling of outline. He also borrowed the theme of open-air hunting still-lifes (e.g. Feathered Game with Three Dogs; Madrid, Prado) from Fyt, but he painted other subjects as well, such as the monumental Vanitas Still-life (e.g. 1633; Lille, Mus. B.-A.).
Ferdinand Kobell
(born in Mannheim, 7 June 1740; died in Munich, 1 February 1799) was a German painter and engraver. He was studying at the University of Heidelberg when the Elector of Bavaria, admiring a landscape, aided him to devote his entire time to painting. He became the pupil of Peter Verschaffelt. He next studied art in Paris (1768-1769). On his return, he was appointed painter to the Cabinet (court painter), and later professor at the Academy. In 1793, he moved to Munich. He was appointed director of the Mannheim Gallery (1798) but died before entering on his duties.
Nikolai Yaroshenko
(Ukrainian: Mykola Oleksandrovych Yaroshenko; Russian: December 13 [O.S. Dec. 1] 1846 in Poltava - July 7 [O.S. June 25] 1898 in Kislovodsk) was a Russian painter of Ukrainian origin. Nikolai Alexandrovich Yaroshenko was born on December 13 [O.S. Dec. 1] 1846 in the city of Poltava, Russian Empire (now in Ukraine) to a son of a Russian Army officer. He chose a military career, but also studied art at Kramskoi's drawing school and at the Saint Petersburg Imperial Academy of Arts. In 1876, he became a leading member of a group of Russian painters called the Peredvizhniki (also known as the Itinerants).