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 :. | Detail of Self-Portrait | Woman in Blue | Countess Howe | Sarah,Lady innes | George III (mk25 |
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Pieter Pourbus
(1523 - 30 January 1584) was a Dutch-born Flemish Renaissance painter. Remi Ommejaghere and his three sons Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk, Bruges, BelgiumPourbus was born in Gouda. He was known primarily for his religious and portrait painting and worked mainly in Bruges, where he had moved from Gouda by 1543. He died in Bruges. His son was the painter Frans Pourbus the Elder and his grandson was Frans Pourbus the younger
Theodore Chasseriau
1819-1856 French Theodore Chasseriau Locations 1819?C56, French painter, b. Santo Domingo. He entered Ingres studio at the age of 12; five years later he gained immediate recognition with the exhibition of his Cain, Cursed and Return of the Prodigal. Chass??riau was the only artist of the age who successfully combined Ingres sense of line and Delacroix rich color and vitality and, at the same time, created his own personal style. After his visit to Algeria in the 1840s, he emphasized the exotic, romantic elements in his painting, while still adhering to classical techniques. Among his best-known works are the Two Sisters, Arabian Challenge, and Tepidarium (all: Louvre). His mural decorations for the Cour des Comptes of the Palais d Orsay, Paris, were destroyed except for a few fragments preserved in the Louvre. His untimely death cut short a brilliant career.
Abraham van den Tempel
(1622?C1672) was a Dutch Golden Age painter. He probably learned painting from his father, also a painter, but who died when he was still quite young, in 1636. That is the same year that he moved to Amsterdam, where he stayed until 1647, whereupon he moved to Leiden. According to Houbraken he was the son of a Mennonite preacher in Leeuwarden who was a respected art teacher. His father was Lambert Jacobsz (or Jacobszoon), who had taught Govert Flinck and Jacob Adriaensz Backer in their youth, both of whom were artists from Mennonite families. Abraham took the name Tempel because when he studied in Leiden, he lived in a house there with a relief of a Tempel in the keystone. He became a pupil of Jacob Backer, and studied mathematics at Leiden University. He met with great success with the Leiden city council, earning several generous commissions, including a series of three large allegorical paintings on the cloth industry of Leiden for the Cloth Hall which still hang in their original place today in the Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal. Sir William Davidson of Curriehill, Conservator of the Cloth Staple at Veere (with his son Charles), 1664.He became master of the Guild of St. Luke in 1657 and in 1659 he was chartermaster. In 1660 he returned to Amsterdam. His pupils were Frans van Mieris the Elder, Carel de Moor, Michiel van Musscher, Ary de Vois, and Isaac Paling