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 John Campbell | The Watering Place (mk08) | Portrait of Sarah Kirby and John Joshua Kirby | miss haverfield, c | The Maket Cart |
Related Artists:
david farquharson,r.a.,a.r.s.a.,r.s.w
1840-1907
Walter Griffin
1861-1935 Walter Burley Griffin November 24, 1876?CFebruary 11, 1937) was a US architect and landscape architect, who is best known for his role in designing Canberra, Australia's capital city. He has also been credited with the development of the L-shaped floor plan, the carport and the first use of reinforced concrete. Influenced by the Chicago-based Prairie School, Griffin went on to develop a unique modern style. For much of his career Griffin worked in partnership with his wife Marion Mahony Griffin. In the 28 years of their architectural partnership, the Griffins designed over 350 building, landscape and urban-design projects as well as designing construction materials, interiors, furniture and other household items.
Aleksander Orlowski
(March 9, 1777 - March 13, 1832) was a Polish painter and sketch maker, pioneer of lithography in the Russian Empire. Orłowski was born in 1777 in Warsaw to a tavern-keeper. In his early childhood he became known as a prodigy and soon Izabela Czartoryska financed his first classes of painting with the notable artist Jan Piotr Norblin. In 1793 Orłowski joined the Polish Army and fought in the Kościuszko Uprising against Imperial Russia and Prussia, but was wounded and returned to Warsaw for further studies, financed by Prince Jezef Poniatowski. He studied with many notable painters of the epoch, among them Norblin, Marcello Bacciarelli and Wincenty Lesserowicz. In 1802, after the Partitions of Poland, he moved to Russia, where he became one of the pioneers of lithography. Among his works are countless sketches of everyday life in Poland and Russia, as well as scenes of the Kościuszko Uprising and other Polish wars.