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 :. | Ritratto di Giovane | Konstnarens dottrar jaggr a fjaril | Detail of Landscape with a Peasant on a path | Master John Heathcote | Portrait of artist-s Wife |
Related Artists:
Theodore Butler
1861-1936
John Frederick Kensett
American Hudson River School Painter, 1816-1872 He attended school at Cheshire Academy, and studied engraving with his immigrant father, Thomas Kensett, and later with his uncle, Alfred Dagget. He worked as engraver in the New Haven area until about 1838, after which he went to work as a bank note engraver in New York City. In 1840, along with Asher Durand and John William Casilear, Kensett traveled to Europe in order to study painting. There he met and traveled with Benjamin Champney. The two sketched and painted throughout Europe, refining their talents. During this period, Kensett developed an appreciation and affinity for 17th century Dutch landscape painting. Kensett and Champney returned to the United States in 1847. After establishing his studio and settling in New York, Kensett traveled extensively throughout the Northeast and the Colorado Rockies as well as making several trips back to Europe. Kensett is best known for his landscape of upstate New York and New England and seascapes of coastal New Jersey, Long Island and New England. He is most closely associated with the so-called "second generation" of the Hudson River School. Along with Sanford Robinson Gifford, Fitz Hugh Lane, Jasper Francis Cropsey, Martin Johnson Heade and others, the works of the "Luminists," as they came to be known, were characterized by unselfconscious, nearly invisible brushstrokes used to convey the qualities and effects of atmospheric light. It could be considered the spiritual, if not stylistic, cousin to Impressionism. Such spiritualism stemmed from Transcendentalist philosophies of sublime nature and contemplation bringing one closer to a spiritual truth.
Franz Ittenbach
(April 18, 1813 - December 1, 1879) was a German religious painter from Königswinter, North Rhine-Westphalia, at the foot of the Drachenfels. Ittenbach began his art education as a student of Kaufmann, then left to study under Franz Katz in Cologne. In 1832, Ittenbach became a pupil, at the age of 19, of the Desseldorf Academy, where he also received private lessons from its president, Schadow. He was a member of the Nazarene movement and associated himself mainly with three of his friends and fellow-students: Karl and Andreas Meller, and Ernst Deger. The four men travelled about in Germany, studying and painting together. From 1839 to 1842, Ittenbach lived in Italy. On his return, he stayed in Munich for some time. In 1849, he returned to Desseldorf. From 1859 until his death, he was a member of the artist club "Malkasten". Ittenbach was exceedingly religious and persistently declined any commissions for mythological or pagan subjects. As a rule, he devoted his energies exclusively to church decoration. He would precede the execution of his greatest works with devout religious exercises, including confession and communion. His finest paintings are said to be found at Bonn, in the church of St. Remigius, and in Breslau in a church dedicated to the same saint. There is also a remarkable "Holy Family" dated 1861, painted for Prince Liechtenstein in his private chapel near Vienna. Most of his other works can be found in various Catholic churches in Germany. His only important fresco was painted in 1844 in a church at Remagen. Ittenbach was a popular painter in court circles, a member of most of the European academies, and the recipient of many medals and decorations. He painted a few portraits, but they were unimportant; his main work was his altar-pieces.