Thomas gainsborough

Thomas Gainsborough /1727-88/ is English painter and foundation member of the Royal Acad­emy. Practically self-taught, he was influenced in his earlier work by the Dutch masters and Vandyke. He broke from tradition by painting his native country-side as he saw it and not as an idealized version of the Roman campagna.

His landscape backgrounds to portraits are free, almost impressionistic, with strong feeling for woodland, solitude. His portraits typically are images of patrician breeding, elegance and self-assurance.

Thomas Gainsborough was one of the founding fathers of the British landscape school. He created works of a delicacy and poetic sensibility.

In 1739, already a prodigy, from his native Sudbury, he was sent to London where he absorbed something of the French Rococo, the elegance of Hayman and the directness of Hogarth. By 1745 he had his own studio in London.

He returned to Sudbury in 1748. The masterpiece of the Sudbury period is Mr. and Mrs. Andrews. At first his paintings were strongly Dutch in flavour, then he moved towards a more French pastoral.

With his arrival in Bath in 1789 Gainsborough rid of provincialism and made a reputation for 1. self as a portrait painter of facility and grace. His first great portrait in the Van Dyck manner was Mrs. Philip Thickness /1760/. Though he had difficulty in selling them he continued to paint as many landscapes as portraits.

The works of his London period /1774-1788/ were characterized by monumentality presenting я challenge to the masters of the past. The Watering Place /1777/ was a direct response to the landscapes of Rubens /1577-1640/. More sympathetic are his paintings of his friends like Johann Fisher /1780/, which is elegant and genial.

In his last years he developed "Fancy Pictures" in which rustic figures, usually children, are posed in a landscape and generate a poetic melancholy.

John constable

John Constable /1776-1837/ is the greatest of the English landscape painters who has never been surpassed. He is remarkable for the boldness of his handling, the "dewy freshness" of his atmospheric ef­fects, and for using actual recognizable parts of the English landscape, not idealized reminiscences of Italy. He painted many well-known works, such as "Flatford Mill", "The Haywain", and «The Lock". He is the first landscape painter to make his sketches direct from nature. He introduced green into painting. He was the last great painter in the tradition received from the Dutch 17^th -c. landscape painters and a forerunner of the impressionists.

William turner

Joseph Mallord William Turner /1775-1851/ is English landscape painter. He presents us with one of the many paradoxes of English Romantic art. He was self-taught but lifelong supported the royal acad­emy. He led a solitary life and was ambitious for social recognition and royal patronage. In some ways a cockney humorist in the tradition of English satirical art, he brought to English painting its sense of the tragedy of landscape.

The son of a London barber, Turner passed his childhood as an assistant to printsellers. He entered the Royal Academician /RAJ Schools in 1789 and began exhibiting watercolours in 1790 and his first oil in 1796. In 1799 he was elected Associate of the Royal Academy /ARA/. At 27 he became Royal Academi­cian /RA/ in 1802. He was Professor of Perspective in the Academy. In 1804 he opened his first private gallery. Turner was a dedicated traveller. He was especially attracted to the scenery of mountains and to the river Coastal sites to show the luminous effect of sky reflected in water.

At first he worked in watercolour, and later worked in oil as well. He began as an emulator of Claude's /1600-82/ calm, static landscapes bathed in clear liquid light.

Later he evolved towards another vision: of the broken light and prismatic colours of an atmos­phere, which partly revealed, partly concealed the accidents of an actual scene.

After Turner's first trip to Italy in 1819 his works became remarkable for their colour and luminos­ity and the swirling movement of his brush Work. Rushing wind, tossing water, broken and reflected light, a rainbow of pure colours: such things characterize his latter art.

He incorporated the iron ships, the trains and bridges of the industrial age, but they seem as vision­ary and phantasmal. Turner dealt with a wide range of subjects, some taken from classical legend. His most famous canvases include Yacht Approaching Coast /1840; Tate/, Peace: Burial at Sea/1842/ and Norham Castle Sunrise /1845; Tate/. His style had very little effect in England. It is in France in the1900's that we must look his successors. As a keen analyst of the effects of light, Turner led to the French Impressionists.