Artists of England

Sir Joshua Reynolds
Thomas Gainsborough
William Hogarth

Sir Joshua Reynolds
Sir Joshua Reynolds (16 July 1723 – 23 February 1792) was an important and influential 18th century English painter, specialising in portraits and promoting the "Grand Style" in painting . He was one of the founders and first President of the Royal Academy.
.Reynolds was born in Plympton, Devon, on 16 July 1723. As one of eleven children, and the son of the village school-master, Reynolds was restricted to a formal education provided by his father. He exhibited a natural curiosity.
Showing an early interest in art, Reynolds was apprenticed in 1740 to the fashionable portrait painter Thomas Hudson, From 1749 to 1752, he spent over two years in Italy, where he studied the Old Masters and acquired a taste for the "Grand Style". From 1753 until the end of his life he lived in London, his talents gaining recognition soon after his arrival in France.
Reynolds worked long hours in his studio, rarely taking a holiday. He was both gregarious and keenly intellectual. His popularity as a portrait painter, Reynolds enjoyed constant interaction with the wealthy and famous men and women of the day. With his rival Thomas Gainsborough, Reynolds was the dominant English portraitist of 'the Age of Johnson'. 12.It is said that in his long life he painted as many as three thousand portraits . In 1789 he lost the sight of his left eye . In 1791 James Boswell dedicated his Life of Samuel Johnson to Reynolds.
Reynolds died on 23 February 1792 in his house in Leicester Fields in London. He was buried at St. Paul's Cathedral.

«Robert Clive and his family with
an Indian maid», painted 1765.

Prosperity permeates this group portrait by Reynolds. Lord George Clive was cousin of Robert Clive, founder of the empire of British India, and made his fortune at that land. Most beautifully painted is the centrally placed Indian nurse, who, kneeling, supports the little girl in Indian courtly attire. Clearly the painter found the Indian's depiction his greatest pleasure.

Colonel Acland and Lord Sydney, The Archers, 1769. In September 2005, the Tate Gallery acquired the painting for over US$4.4 million

A full length double portrait showing the aristocrats Colonel John Dyke Acland on the right (1746-1778) and Dudley Alexander Sydney Cosby (1732-1774). Reynolds carefully chose to depict his sitters using bows, although a shotgun was a more popular weapon at the time. The archers form a superb compositional motif that draws on the kind of classical allusions that formed part of Reynolds's mature portrait repertoire. It is also significant that the portrait was begun in 1769, the year when Reynolds became the 1st president of the new Royal Academy.

Charles Lennox, 3rd Duke of Richmond painted 1758

Thomas Gainsborough
Gainsborough was born in Sudbury, Suffolk, on May 14, 1727. He showed artistic ability at an early age, and when he was 15 years old he studied drawing and etching in London with the French engraver Hubert Gravelot. Later he studied painting with Francis Hayman, a painter of historical events. Through Gravelot, who had been a pupil of the great French painter Antoine Watteau, Gainsborough came under Watteau's influence. Later he was also influenced by the painters of the Dutch school and by the Flemish painter Sir Anthony van Dyck. From 1745 to 1760 Gainsborough lived and worked in Ipswich. From 1760 to 1774 he lived in Bath, a fashionable health resort, where he painted numerous portraits and landscapes.Gainsborough settled in London the same year. He was the favorite painter of the British aristocracy, becoming wealthy through commissions for portraits. Gainsborough died in London on August 2, 1788.

The Blue Boy (1770). The Huntington, California.

The Blue Boy (c. 1770) is an oil painting by Thomas Gainsborough. Perhaps Gainsborough's most famous work, it is thought to be a portrait of Jonathan Buttall, the son of a wealthy hardware merchant, although this was never proved. It is a historical costume study as well as a portrait: the youth in his 17th-century apparel is regarded as Gainsborough's homage to Anthony Van Dyck, and in particular is very close to Van Dyck's portrait of Charles II as a boy.
Gainsborough had already painted something on the canvas before beginning The Blue Boy, which he painted over. The painting itself is on a fairly large canvas for a portrait, measuring 48 inches wide by 70 inches tall. The portrait now resides in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

Gainsborough`s Daughter Mary (1777)

His best works, such as Portrait of Mrs. Graham; Mary and Margaret: The Painter's Daughters; William Hallett and His Wife Elizabeth, nee Stephen, known as The Morning Walk; and Cottage Girl with Dog and Pitcher, display the uniqueness (individuality) of his subjects. His only assistant was his nephew Gainsborough Dupont

Portrait of the Composer Carl Friedrich Abel with his Viola da Gamba (c. 1765)

Portrait of Carl Friedrich Abel, composer and viol master—German-born but residing in England most of his life—posed with his viola da gamba. By Thomas Gainsborough, c. 1765

William Hogarth
William Hogarth was born on 10 November, 1697. . He was the 5th child of Richard Hogarth, a schoolmaster and classical scholar from the north of England who had come to London in the mid-1680s. His father’s premature death in 1718 affected Hogarth’s early life, his training and forced him to earn money. He was a major English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic and editorial cartoonist who has been credited with pioneering western sequential art. His work ranged from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called "modern moral subjects". Much of his work poked fun at contemporary politics and customs; illustrations in such style are often referred to as "Hogarthian". His first works included a number of commissions for small etched cards and bookplates, and in 1721 he produced two inventive engraved allegories. With these topical prints The South Sea Scheme and The Lottery, which aroused considerable attention, he started his black-and-white satires which made him so widely known in Britain and abroad. His first success as a painter was in the ‘conversational pieces’, in which figure informal groups of family and friends surrounded by customary things from their everyday life.William Hogarth is unquestionably one of the greatest English artists and a man of remarkably individual character and thought. He is the great innovator in English art.

Shortly After the Marriage, Marriage à-la-mode series, 1743

Marriage a la Mode is a Restoration comedy by John Dryden, first performed in London in 1673 by the King's Company. It is written in a combination of prose, blank verse and heroic couplets. It has often been praised as Dryden’s best comedic and Sutherland accounts for this by observing that "the comic scenes are beautifully written, and Dryden has taken care to connect them with the serious plot by a number of effective links. He writes with . . . one of the most thoughtful treatments of sex and marriage that Restoration comedy can show

The Death of the Earl, Marriage à-la-mode series, 1743

And rich on human feelings a series «. Marriage а la Mode », finished in 1743 was even more known. William Hogarth it is live was interested in a public life and has proved to be the acute moralist in the attempt to explain a society of time