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Thomas Gainsborough, artist
British, 1727 - 1788
Mrs. Fitzherbert, 1784
oil on canvas
29 7/8 x 25 (75.9 x 63.5 cm)
Mildred Anna Williams Collection 1941.19
Artist Credit: all
Artist Biography: Gainsborough was born in Suffolk, the fifth son of a wool merchant. He studied at Saint Martin's Lane Academy in London from 1740 to 1748 with Hubert Gravelot, an engraver and illustrator in the French rococo style, and Francis Hayman, a painter of small portrait groups. To support himself, Gainsborough copied and repaired seventeenth-century Dutch landscapes, notably those of Jan Wynants and Jacob van Ruisdael, which were popular with English collectors. He was an acknowledged landscape painter by 1748 when he presented The Charterhouse to the Foundling Hospital. He returned to Suffolk in 1748, eventually settling in Ipswich as a portrait painter. From 1759 to 1774 Gainsborough lived in Bath, the fashionable resort of the aristocracy, where he deliberately refined his portrait style in the manner of Anthony van Dyck. He exhibited at the Society for Artists in London from 1761 to 1768, and was invited to be a founding member of the Royal Academy in 1768. After several disagreements with the academy over the hanging of his pictures, Gainsborough withdrew and exhibited his work annually from 1784 at Schomberg House, his London residence. Gainsborough died in August 1788, and later that year his great rival Sir Joshua Reynolds paid special tribute to this artist in his fourteenth discourse to the Royal Academy.~ First interest in his printmaking from Max Friedl‰nder just before 1914. Important in development of processes of aquatint and soft ground etching.
Related Keywords
Fitzherbert Mrs Williams Anna Mildred Europe England Painting canvas oil Thomas Gainsborough British 7822312331650007 A303317 1941.19 EPTG
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