Book Description

Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) was one of the masters of 18th-century art. This stunning book, published to accompany a major international exhibition, covering the artist's entire career, reveals the sheer range, quality, and originality of Gainsborough's work, from his engagingly naturalistic landscapes and touching images of children to his sophisticated and glamorous society portraits.

In their revealing essay, Michael Rosenthal and Martin Myrone explore Gainsborough's dynamic involvement with the social world of his day, while other essays explore his subtle approach to the lucrative world of fashionable portraiture and the often pointed social commentary behind his seductive landscapes. This volume provides new and refreshing insights into Gainsborough as an artist who succeeded in creating an experimental and modern art for his own time, and whose works remain vital and rewarding today. ... Read more

Reviews (2)

Belsey Offers a Compelling Portrait of Early Gainsborough
This is an engaging book focusing on the earlier landscape paintings and portraits completed in Ipswich and Bath. The observations on the details of the paintings are acute and perceptive. The author illuminates with a thorough knowledge of the social mores and conventions of 18th Century England. For painters and artists, the insights on formal composition and color are instructive.

The narrative text is laced with a wit, humor, and irony that perhaps one can only find in an English art historian writing about a consummate English artist. The book is also mercifully focused and short, alleviating some of the bludgeon like tediousness of many art history tomes.

Thomas Gainsborough: A Country Life by Hugh Belsey
Mr Belsey has truimphed with this book - it is packed with detail that is conveyed in an accessible style of writing that enables the reader to absorb information whilst, at the same time, enjoying the whole experience. ... Read more

Book Description

This handsome gift volume reveals the stories behind theHuntington's best-known paintings, The Blue Boy by Thomas Gainsborough andPinkie by Sir Thomas Lawrence. Who were the children in these paintings and whydid these leading artists choose them as subjects? Wark, retired curator of theHuntington art collections, answers a number of questions about these famouspaintings. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

A best loved book, for best loved paintings!
I love art history and I got some old prints of these paintings. However, I wanted to learn more about them. After much time and research I finally came across this book. It helped me out more then any other resource. I fell in love with it when I read it. It answered all my questions I had about the paintings, like why they are displayed together even though they were painted by different artists? or, Who was bluleboy and pinkie? The book also touches on other paintings by the same artists, which I found helpful and made me want to learn more. I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves art, or art-history. It would be a good source for art-history teachers too! ... Read more

Book Description

Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) is one of the most appealing English artists of the eighteenth century. Renowned for such elegant portraits as The Blue Boy and Countess Howe, he also pioneered a new form of landscape with a moody sensibility that prefigured the Romantic movement. A brilliant draftsman, his art is full of inventiveness and visual delight. Drawing upon recently discovered material, William Vaughan provides a fresh perspective on both the life and art of this master. He shows how closely Gainsborough's innovative manner can be connected to social and political developments in Britain, in particular the celebration of original genius in a time of burgeoning entrepreneurial commercialism. Above all, he demonstrates how, beneath the artist's charm, there lay a bedrock of shrewd observation and pictorial intelligence that gives his work a value for all time. 176 illustrations, 61 in color. ... Read more

Reviews (1)

orsaylady
Wonderful overview of Gainsborough's life in 18th century England. Highly recommend it if you are a Georgian art fan like I am. ... Read more

Book Description

In this sumptuously illustrated book, Michael Rosenthal provides alively account of Thomas Gainsborough's varied life and diverse artworks. Rosenthalexamines the artist's portraits, landscapes, and fancy pictures, works of extraordinarybeauty and complexity. The book also considers for the first time Gainsborough's entirebody of works and how his career reflected problems and situations common amongpainters in eighteenth-century England. ... Read more

Reviews (2)

Skip this book
The book cover states that the book is lavishly illustrated; the cover is but not the book. It is not up to Yale standards.The photographs are small and blurry, often the colors are incorrect.Please wait for a good Catalogue Raisonne. As for the text, so many years of good research wasted. The text is ponderous, poorly written with endless sentences full of quotes and inserts.The author is critical , judgemental and constantly makes assumptions or gives personal and mostly unsubstanciated opinions. It is another book for Art History students (the author is an Art History teacher) not for lovers of paintings. I returned the book to Amazon.

Much more than "A Little Business for the Eye"
Both the serious art scholar and the general reader will appreciate this visual and textual treat of a book which is truly "The Art of Thomas Gainsborough." Many of the plates I had not seen reproduced in previous books on Gainsborough, and Rosenthal's view of Gainsborough, that he was much more serious an artist and business man than he or his contemporaries saw him. I first went through this book, feasting my eyes on all the plates(most of which are in color and beautifully reproduced), which are roughly divided between Gainsborough's portraits, which he painted to meet market demand and pay the bills and his landscapes which he painted for pleasure. Rosenthal's plates also include details from certain paintings, so that the reader can study Gainsborough's brushwork and see clearly why much of his work suffers when hung from the wrong height or is viewed too close to.

While this book is roughly chronological, it is not a biography of Gainsborough, it is a biography of his work. Rosenthal traces Gainsborough's art from his beginings in Sudbury, his training and apprenticeship, early work in London, move to Bath as a better market to make money and perfect his skill as a portrait painter, and final move to London, resulting in his popularity as a portrait painter, establishment as a painter-courtier to the Royal Family and unofficial portraitist to members of the same,the near annual battles with the hanging commitee of the Royal Academy on the proper hanging of his submitted works, which led to his breaking with the academy as a member, his failures to sell many of his beloved landscape paintings, and his first serious attempt to create a historical painting in the final months of his life.

Original to this work on Gainsborough is the central theme that Gainsborough, like his fellow English artists, had to paint to the market demands, which in England meant portraits sold, while landscapes and history paintings generally did not. That meant pleasing the clientele without "selling out," something Gainsborough found sometimes difficult to do. Artists also painted differently, often using brighter colors and altering the paintings afterwards, to get their work noticed at the annual Royal Academy exibitions. Rosenthal includes illustrations of these overcrowded exibitions(both in paintings exibited hung floor to ceiling, and the crowds of people viewing them)to give the reader an idea of why Gainsborough and other artists were often unhappy with the hanging committees decisions on where their paintings were hung.

Most fascinating is the chapter "Faces and Lives" where Rosenthal compares and contrasts not only Gainsborough's multiple portraits of the same subject, but also with portraits of the same subject done by his rival, and President of the Royal Academy, Sir Josah Reynolds. Reynold's more often painted his sitters in a historic style with the sitters' faces sometimes altered so that acquintances didn't recognize them while Gainsborough's sitters were easily recognizable, if flattered. The prime example of this differences between the two painters are their portraits, of the actress Sarah Siddons, reproduced side by side in the book. Reynolds painted her as the "Tragic Muse", on a throne-like chair, clad in classical draperies. Gainsborough's slightly later portrait depicted her perched on a dainty French chair, dressed in the latest fashion, gazing off into space(contemplating her newest role, perhaps?)with the only clue to her career, a crimson curtain draped as background. ... Read more

Book Description

This is the first introduction to the art and life of Thomas Gainsborough to appear for many years. Gainsborough has long been an attractive and popular figure in the history of English art, but this book shows that he was more than the well-known painter of The Blue Boy and the perennial rival to Joshua Reynolds.His role as a prototype for the modern idea of "the artist as Romantic" is discussed, while his deep knowledge of the art of the past is revealed to demonstrate his eclectic yet individual reworking of older styles. An introduction and seventy-five carefully selected paintings and drawings explain Gainsborough's life and art and his important role in the development of an independent English school.Both text and illustrations provide a unique up-to-date and perceptive survey that will be of interest to the scholar and general reader alike. ... Read more

Book Description

Book Description

When Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) arrived in the spa town of Bath, England, at the age of thirty-one, he was an artist of modest reputation. When he left sixteen years later, he was recognized as one of Europe's foremost painters. In this exceptional book, Susan Sloman examines for the first time how this transformation took place. She offers an entirely new view of Gainsborough's development during his middle years as well as abundant new information about Bath and its role, for a few decades in the eighteenth century, as a cultural center of Europe.

Drawing on freshly discovered documents and a variety of little-known contemporary published sources, Sloman illuminates artistic activity in Bath and Gainsborough's part in it. She reveals how Gainsborough's prominence as an artist and Bath's as a cultural hub were intimately connected during a period in which the artist and his town flourished together. ... Read more