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 :. | The Charterhouse, | Landscape with Peasant and Horses | Portrait of James Christie | Portrait of Hon.Charles Hamilton | Mrs Mary Robinson (mk25 |
Related Artists:
MASOLINO da Panicale
Italian Early Renaissance Painter, ca.1383-1447 Florentine painter of the early Renaissance, whose real name was Tommaso di Cristoforo Fini. His versatile painting incorporated his feeling for decorative color with strong modeling and spatial organization. He was admitted (1423) to the apothecaries' guild in Florence, in which painters were enrolled, and was soon commissioned to paint the frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel in Florence. These were continued by his pupil Masaccio upon Masolino's departure (1427) for Hungary and were completed by Filippino Lippi, thus greatly complicating the question of authorship; currently scholars attribute to Masolino St. Peter Preaching, St. Peter Healing the Cripple, The Raising of Tabitha, and The Fall of Adam and Eve. Upon his return to Florence, Masolino found painters occupied with problems of perspective, light and shade, and classical architecture and decoration, ideas that he utilized while retaining much of the old Giottesque tradition. He went to Rome where he painted frescoes in the Church of San Clemente for the Cardinal Branda Castiglione. For the same patron he decorated the church of Castiglione di Olona in the province of Como, Italy. There he represented scenes from the life of the Virgin and of St. John the Baptist. Attributed to Masolino are The Foundation of Santa Maria Maggiore and a Madonna and Christ in Glory (Naples);
Sidney Starr
British. 1857-1925
Otto Boetticher
Circa 1816-