Thomas Gainsborough
from Harry N. Abrams
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.
Gainsborough: Colour Library (Phaidon Colour Library)
by Nicola Kalinsky
from Phaidon Press
The Art of Thomas Gainsborough: "A Little Business for the Eye" (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in Britis)
by Michael Rosenthal
from Paul Mellon Center BA
In this sumptuously illustrated book, Michael Rosenthal provides a lively account of Thomas Gainsborough's varied life and diverse artworks. Rosenthal examines the artist's portraits, landscapes, and fancy pictures, works of extraordinary beauty and complexity. The book also considers for the first time Gainsborough's entire body of works and how his career reflected problems and situations common among painters in eighteenth-century England.
Sensation and Sensibility: Viewing Gainsborough's "Cottage Door"
from Yale University Press
Late in his career Thomas Gainsborough became preoccupied with the theme of the cottage door, and he created a group of paintings and drawings that show rustic figures clustered around the open door of a cottage set in a deeply wooded landscape. Often seen as exemplars of the rural idyll, these works were among the first landscape paintings to reflect the eighteenth-century aesthetic of sensibility. As a way of seeing, sensibility valued nature for its innocence and simplicity, and images, such as Gainsborough’s cottage subjects, for their power to move the viewer.
This lovely book brings together the cottage door paintings and essays that discuss Gainsborough’s departure from the more naturalistic style of his earlier career and that place his new concern with sentimentalism and artificiality in the context of sensibility and the growing interest in expressive, even sensational, visual spectacles. To this end, contributors to the volume investigate new viewing practices associated with sensibility, the meaning of the cottage for Gainsborough and his contemporaries, the artist’s creation of affecting landscapes through the use of peasant subjects, and his theatrical treatment of these subjects in order to heighten his viewers’ emotional responses.
Gainsborough (World of Art)
by William Vaughan
from Thames & Hudson
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.
Gainsborough: 16 Art Stickers (Dover Fine Art Stickers)
by Thomas Gainsborough
from Dover Publications
Gainsborough's Beautiful Mrs. Graham
by Hugh Belsey
from National Galleries Of Scotland
This book explores the National Gallery of Scotland's world famous portrait The Honourable Mrs Graham by Thomas Gainsborough, one of the finest and most sensitive British portrait painters of the eighteenth century. An exquisite society beauty, Mary Graham (1757-1792) sat for Gainsborough for at least three portraits. Following her tragically early death from tuberculosis, her husband, later Lord Lynedoch, was so grief-stricken that he had the portrait stored in a London warehouse. It was not until after his death, more than forty years later, that an heir rediscovered the painting and bequeathed it to the Scottish nation on condition that it never leave Edinburgh. Gainsborough's Beautiful Mrs Graham comprehensively explores the personal, social and historical context of the painting and the family who owned it and goes on to examine the afterlife of a picture whose popularity has generated a whole industry of souvenir production.
Thomas Gainsborough: A Country Life (Art & Design)
by Hugh Belsey
from Prestel Publishing
This new study on Thomas Gainsborough concentrates on the early life and works of the great eighteenth-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 providing 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. But 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 lively and accessible volume features eighty color 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 realize his full talents.
The Paintings of Thomas Gainsborough
by Malcolm Cormack
from Cambridge University Press
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.
Thomas Gainsborough (British Artists)
by Martin Postle
from Princeton University Press
Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), admired for his grand society portraits and sumptuous pastoral landscapes, is the most perennially popular of British artists. In his life as in his art, Gainsborough sought to project an image of effortless accomplishment, demonstrated by a dazzling painting technique and immense personal charm. He was also competitive, opinionated, and financially astute. Because he was among the most innovative and enigmatic artists of his age, the true nature of his achievement is at once greatly appreciated and insufficiently understood.
This illustrated introduction to the artist and his work traces Gainsborough's career from his boyhood in rural Suffolk to the pinnacle of commercial success at the court of George III. Martin Postle examines the tremendous impact on Gainsborough's career of the Royal Academy and the Court of St. James. Postle also reassesses the artist's attitudes toward the central aspects of his art: portraiture (which he called his profession) and landscape (which he called his pleasure). While revealing Gainsborough in the light of his own day, this attractive book also highlights the timelessness of his work--the celebrated brushwork, lyrical composition, and almost miraculous use of color.
