Background
Thomas was born on 14 May in 1727 at Sudbury, a small country town in Suffolk, United Kingdom, the youngest son of a prosperous cloth merchant, and baptized on May 14 at the Independent Meeting House in Friars Street.
(This study on Thomas Gainsborough concentrates on the ear...)
This study on Thomas Gainsborough concentrates on the early life and works of the great 18th-century artist. Gainsborough's talent was evident at a young age, and before he established himself as one of London's leading portrait artists he was able to indulge himself in his true passion, landscapes, as well as to provide portraits for a provincial clientele. Graced with the light and gentle shadows of the English countryside, these early works provided the foundation for much of Gainsborough's later work. However many of them, including the renowned "Mr and Mrs Andrews", and "His Daughters Chasing a Butterfly", can be called masterpieces in their own right. It was in Suffolk that the artist developed a naturalistic approach to portraiture by abandoning "conversation pieces" and painting instead a number of straightforward head-and-shoulder portraits. This volume features 80 colour and black-and-white reproductions of Gainsborough's paintings, etchings and drawings. They not only shed light on the development of one of England's most revered painters, but also offer an intimate look at the work of a young painter in the thrall of his subjects, and just beginning to realise his full talents.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/3791327844/?tag=2022091-20
( Focusing specifically on Thomas Gainsboroughs portrait...)
Focusing specifically on Thomas Gainsboroughs portraits of well-known, ?liberated, society women, Thomas Gainsborough and the Modern Woman draws us away from his predominant reputation as a landscape painter. It shows how such portraits were both an affirmation by Gainsborough of his own position in the artistic world of Georgian England, and of the desire of his famous, and often notorious, sitters to be seen as self-assured progressive women. Author Benedict Leca takes as his starting point the Cincinnati Art Museums famous and newly restored portrait of Ann Ford (1760). Widely considered the finest of the masterpiece portraits created by Gainsborough at Bath in the early 1760s, it typifies the artist's comparatively permissive attitude with regard to how women should be presented, and offers a compelling view of the manner of painting that established the artist as the foremost portraitist of modern life. Featuring portraits from international collections, including Tate Britain, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the J Paul Getty Museum and the National Gallery, London, this new volume also includes an essay by Aileen Ribeiro examining the portrait of Ann Ford in detail, and by Amber Ludwig discussing the role of feminine identity in 18th-century London.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1904832857/?tag=2022091-20
Thomas was born on 14 May in 1727 at Sudbury, a small country town in Suffolk, United Kingdom, the youngest son of a prosperous cloth merchant, and baptized on May 14 at the Independent Meeting House in Friars Street.
Gainsborough, however, was an artistic prodigy, and around 1740 he went to London, where he studied with the French artist Hubert François Gravelot and then with Francis Hayman.
His earliest known picture is a lively portrait of a dog in a landscape setting, dated 1745.
While pictures such as the Cornard Wood (National Gallery, London) painted in 1748 are full of the soft gray light and moist atmosphere of his native Suffolk, the compositions and much of the detail are based on Dutch prototypes.
Although the earlier portraits of his Ipswich period are often very stiffly painted, a weakness which persisted to some degree, he had exceptional gifts for rendering the likeness and mood of his sitters, together with a sparkling freshness and liveliness of touch.
He continued to paint landscapes, which were always his chief love, many of them clearly as decorative pictures for overmantels - two pictures of this kind were commissioned by the Duke of Bedford in 1755 - but began to develop an artificial rococo style which was the English counterpart of Boucher and Fragonard. In 1759, becoming more confident of his powers and evidently feeling the limitations of a practice in East Anglia, he moved to Bath, which was then a fashionable spa.
He now formed his style on the refined elegance of Anthony Van Dyck, and, contrary to the practice of the day, never employed a drapery painter, loving to paint the silks and satins and lace of ladies' dresses, or the gold braid and velvet and sword hilts of male costume, at least as much as he did the heads of his sitters.
In the summertime, there was a respite from portraiture, and Thomas Gainsborough made frequent sketching expeditions into the country; he was deeply influenced by the brilliant effects and bold handling of Rubens, whose pictures he was able to study in West Country collections, and during the later 1760's and early 1770's, painted a series of large landscape compositions inspired by Rubens - of which the Harvest Waggon (Barber Institute, Birmingham) is the most famous - that rank amongst his masterpieces.
Although there are many passages of acute perception in his later landscapes, these tended to become more and more artificial, and may largely have been composed of little models which he was in the habit of making on his table; a series of mountain landscapes executed in the 1780's reflected the current taste for "the Sublime, " and his Cottage Door compositions with their contented peasant families grouped on the threshold, his own sentimental attitude towards country life.
His feeling for theatrical effects of light found expression in the invention of a peep-show box, in which he used painted transparencies lit from behind by candles.
In his drawings he constantly experimented with new techniques, and evolved an ever more fluent style, suggesting forms with a few simple washes and using chalks with the sweep and fury of a Van Gogh.
But his landscapes and drawings were much copied.
( Focusing specifically on Thomas Gainsboroughs portrait...)
(This study on Thomas Gainsborough concentrates on the ear...)
Gainsborough was a founding member of the Royal Academy.
Thomas Gainsborough was a brilliant and witty letter writer, while in his personal relations he was impulsive, wayward, warmhearted, and generous.
In 1746 Thomas Gainsborough married to Margaret Burr, who seems to have been an illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Beaufort and possessed an annuity of £200p200 a year, at Dr. Keith's Mayfair chapel, then much in use for the celebration of clandestine marriages; his two daughters, Mary and Margaret, were born at Sudbury in 1748 and 1752 respectively.
