He was born at Sudbury, Soffolk, and went to London in about 1740, probably studying with the French engraver Gravelot. He returned to Sudbury in 1748 and in 1752 he set up as a portrait painter at Ipswitch. His work at this time consisted mainly of heads and half-length, but he also painted some small portrait groups in landscape settings which are the most lyrical of all English conversation pieces (Heneage Lloyd and his Sister, Fitzwilliam, Cambridge). His patrons were the merchants of the town and the neighboring squires, but when in 1759 he moved to Bath, his new sitters were members of Society, and he developed a free and elegant mode of painting seen at its most characteristic in full-length portraits (Mary, Countess Howe, Kenwood House, London, c.1763-64).
In 1768 he was elected a foundation member of the Royal Academy, and in 1774 he moved permanently to London. He became a favorite painter of the Royal Family, even though his rival Reynolds was appointed King's Principal Painter.
Gainsborough sometimes said that while portraiture was his profession landscape painting was his pleasure, and he continued to paint landscapes long after he had left a country neighborhood. He produced many landscape drawings, some in pencil, some in charcoal and chalk, and he occasionally made drawings which he varnished. Gainsborough's style had diverse sources. His early works show the influence of French engraving and of Dutch landscape painting; at Bath his change of portrait style owed much to a close study of van Dyck (his admiration is most clear in The Blue Boy, Huntingdon Art Gallery, San Marino, 1770); and in his later landscapes (The Watering Place, National Gallery, London, 1777) he is sometimes influenced by Rubens.
But he was an independent and original genius, and he relied always mainly on his own resources. With the exception of his nephew Gainsborough Dupont, he had no assistants and unlike most of his contemporaries he never employed a drapery painter.
He was in many ways the antithesis of Reynolds. Whereas Reynolds was sober-minded and the complete professional, Gainsborough (even though his output was prodigious) was much more easy-going and often overdue with his commissions, writing that`painting and punctuality mix like oil and vinegar'. Although he was an entertaining letter-writer, Gainsborough, unlike Reynolds, had no interest in literary or historical themes, his great passion outside painting being music (his friend William Jackson the composer wrote that he `avoided the company of literary men, who were his aversion... he detested reading'). Gainsborough and Reynolds had great mutual respect, however; Gainsborough asked for Reynolds to visit him on his deathbed, and Reynolds paid posthumous tribute to his rival in his Fourteenth Discourse. Recognizing the fluid brilliance of his brushwork, Reynolds praised `his manner of forming all the parts of a picture together', and wrote of `all those odd scratches and marks' that `by a kind of magic, at a certain distance... seem to drop into their proper places'.
Biography William Hogarth 1663 - 1664(?)
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. On one hand, he was the first to paint themes from Shakespeare, Milton and the theatre, and the founder of a wholly original genre of moral history, which was long known as Hogarthian. On the other, he investigated the aesthetic principles of his art, which resulted in his book “ The Analysis of Beauty ”(1753).
William Hogarth was born on 10 November, 1697 - i.e. six days after the celebration of King William's birthday on 4 Nov.: hence, probably, his name. 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.
In February 1713/14, Hogarth began his apprenticeship to a plate engraver, Ellis Gamble, who was a distant relation. By April 1720, he set up an independent business as an engraver. His first works included a number of commissions for small etched cards and bookplates, and in 1721 he produced two inventive engraved allegories The South Sea Scheme and The Lottery, which aroused considerable attention. 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. In 1729, he married a daughter of his painting teacher Sir James Thornhill Jane Thornhill, without her parents' consent and after an elopement. Reconciliation soon ensued. They moved into the Great Piazza of Covent Garden with the Thornhills, where WH could use a studio appropriate to a portraitist.
Probably with the encouragement of Thonhill Hogarth turns to painting. His first of the series - The scene from The Beggar’s Opera, the picture of an actual stage, brought him great success, and at about about 1730, he was commissioned for several versions. The result of this accomplishment was the idea of his own ‘theater’: the creation of ‘pictorial dramas’ and reaching wider public through the means of engraving. The first successful series The Harlot’s Progress, the first "modern history" series, probably suggested by various contemporary incidents and trials involving robbers, prostitutes, procuresses and rakes, extensively and repeatedly reported in the newspapers; especially the trial for rape of Colonel Charter is, an infamous rake, convicted and then pardoned by the King, who was the occasion for many pamphlets and prints (and may have inspired Richardson's "Mr. B." in Pamela). Also inspired by Defoe's Moll Flanders and Steele's Spectator campaign against prostitution. The six paintings (which have not survived) describing the fate of "Mary Hackabout" were completed in 1731 and the subscription for the copper plates (engraved by WH himself) opened with great success, curiosity being aroused by the complete novelty of the undertaking, with many topical details and allusions and several recognizable faces. The immense popular success of the series led to piratical imitations, pamphlets and poems. In 1735 comes another series of paintings A Rake's Progress, Hogarth 's most Swiftian satire, an association which Swift himself acknowledged in his poem "The Legion" (1736), 219-230. The painting and the engraving of the series describing the life of "Tom Rakewell" from the gaming table to Bedlam is very uneven, with a notable tendency towards violence and disorder and some unusual flaws. Hogarth’ satires were serious moral and social satires, besides being good paintings. In 1935, he opened his own academy in St. Martyn's Lane.
In 1738 – 1743: Jean-Baptiste Van Loo comes to London where he soon asserts himself as the most fashionable portrait painter until his departure in 1742, superseding all English portrait painters such as Vanderbank or Higher. Against this new foreign challenge, and that offered by the young, successful, and Italianate Allan Ramsay, Hogarth decides to become a portrait painter himself. In portraiture, Hogarth displays a great variety and originality. The charm of childhood, a delightful delicacy of color appear in The Graham Children (1742). The portrait heads of his servants are penetrating studies of character: Hogarth's Servants. (c.1750). The painting of Captain Thomas Coram (1740), the philanthropic sea captain who took a leading part in the foundation of the Foundling Hospital, adapts the formality of the ceremonial portrait to a democratic level. The painter’s character is reflected faithfully in his forthright Self-Portrait with Pug-Dog (1745).
The quality of Hogarth as an artist is seen to advantage in his sketches and one sketch in particular, the famous The Shrimp Girl (c.1740-1743) quickly executed with a limited range of color, stands alone in his work, taking its place among the masterpieces of the world in its harmony of form and content, its freshness and vitality. 1743 – 1745: Marriage-a-la-Mode advertised for subscription, in six copper-plates engraved "by the best Masters in Paris" (WH himself doing the faces).
A trip to Paris In 1748 with a few fellow artists, just after the peace of Aix-la-Chapelle for preliminary sketches of the Calais Gate, caused Hogarth to be carried before the governor as a spy. Hogarth disliked everything he saw in France and in 1749 he paints in revenge The Gate of Calais, or The Roast-Beef of Old England, a painting and a print, recording his recent misadventure. Later this year The Hogarths buy a villa in Chiswick by the Thames, where WH spends as muchtime as he can with his wife and his sister Anne. Apparently the Hogarths had no children.
1755: The idea of a state academy being again the occasion of debates and pamphlets, WH seems to have withdrawn or at least absented himself from the St. Martin's Lane academy, where the state academy had many supporters, and whose leading figure now was Reynolds. He had become the most successful portrait painter of the day, the darling of the fashionable, world whom Hogarth had alienated. Hogarth's views are reflected in his friend Rouquet's essay The State of the Arts in England (first published in French in 1754 as L'Etat des Arts en Angleterre). However, either because he felt that the idea could not be defeated, or because lie thought that it would be a good idea to support a counter-project, WH joined the Society of Arts which William Shipley had founded the year before to offer artistic training, organize joint exhibitions and give prizes to young artists, and where lie was very active in favour of poor artists until lie resigned in 1760.
1756: Discouraged by the difficulties encountered in the engraving of the Election series, WH announces in the press that he intends to abandon the comic histories and retreat into portrait painting - as if to challenge Reynolds. Most of the portraits of these years are characteristically unfinished or without backgrounds, some in the manner of Rembrandt's chiaroscuro; e.g. David Garrick and his Wife, Lady Thornhill, Saunders Welch, Lord Charlemont, Boy in a Green Coat and above all Hogarth's Servants and The Shrimp Girl.
1757: WH is appointed Sergeant-Painter to the King, an honorary position (Ј10 a year) which Thornhill had held before him and passed to his son John, who died that year. But this sinecure implied the monopoly on all the painting or gilding made in the royal palaces and stables, on ships, tents, banners, coaches, etc.; the actual work was done by deputies and the Sergeant-Painter received lucrative fees. Hogarth died in 1764 in London and is buried in Chiswick cemetery.
Biography John Constable (British, 1776–1837)
Constable entered the art world fairly late in life, and he made painfully slow progress once he was in it. Born at East Bergholt, Suffolk, the son of a prosperous corn merchant, John Constable spent several years in the family business before deciding, and obtaining permission, to study painting full-time. Before he went to the Royal Academy schools in 1799 (the same year that Turner, only very slightly older, was elected as an Associate). Once in London, Constable studied Old Master landscapes in the collections of Beaumont, Beckford and the influential Academician Joseph Farington. Constable continued to study and copy the work of his predecessors for as long as he lived, constantly measuring their interpretations of the natural world against his own experience of it. In 1802 he exhibited at the Academy for the first time and also received an invitation to become a drawing master at a military establishment. This he rejected, having now set himself a more ambitious goal. Constable returned one day from Beaumont's collection 'with a deep conviction', he told Dunthorne, 'of the truth of Sir Joshua Reynolds's observation that "there is no easy way of becoming a good painter". It can only be obtained by long contemplation and incessant labour in the executive part... I shall shortly, return to Bergholt, where I shall make some laborious studies from nature. He continued to make outdoor oil studies until the 1820-s.
His first major Suffolk landscape, 'Dedham Vale: Morning', was shown at the Academy in 1811 but passed unnoticed. His first sale to a stranger came only in 1814, when the bookseller James Carpenter gave him twenty guineas and some books for his previous year's production. To professional worries were added the frustrations of his long drawn-out engagement to Maria Bicknell, whose family opposed their marriage.
Finding only occasional buyers for his landscapes, Constable was forced to supplement the allowance he received from his parents by undertaking portrait commissions and other 'jobs'. One of his earliest and largest efforts of this kind was the group portrait of the Bridges family, painted in 1804, while his later portraiture is represented in the Tate by pictures of Dr and Mrs Andrews. Faced with more sympathetic sitters, Constable revealed considerable potential in this field, as his portrait of Maria Bicknell shows. This was painted in 1816, a few months before they married. With a new confidence (and soon to be relieved of some of his financial worries), Constable set his sights even higher. Although 'Flatford Mill', exhibited in 1817, remained on his hands, he began the first of his six-foot canvases of river subjects, 'The White Horse', showing it at the Academy in 1819.
This time his work was too large to remain unnoticed. Constable was finally elected an A.R.A. later that year, at the age of forty-three. Fisher bought both this painting and its successor, 'Stratford Mill'. The next two pictures in the series, 'The Hay Wain' and 'View on the Stour near Dedham' went to the Parisian dealer Arrowsmith in 1824 and created a lively, if short-lived, interest in France.
Although Constable never lost his affection for the scenery of the Suffolk-Essex border, he gradually extended the range of his subject matter. His visits, in particular, to Salisbury, where his friend Fisher lived and to Brighton, where he took Maria for the sake of her health, provided him with much new material. But it was Hampstead that became the main focus of his later work. The Constables first took a house there, in addition to their London home, in 1819. At Hampstead Constable became more acutely conscious of weather as a continuous phenomenon, for ever altering the appearance of the landscape: he became, indeed, more aware of the changefulness of nature as a whole. In 1821 and 1822 he undertook an intense study of the most transient of all natural phenomena, the sky, producing dozens of cloud sketches, annotating them with precise details of time, wind direction and so on. In his larger paintings of the late 1820s and 1830s placid summer scenes gave way to more unsettled conditions: a choppy sea and figures scurrying before the wind. When Maria died of tuberculosis in 1828 he felt that 'the face of the World is totally changed to me'. The following year, at the age of fifty-two, Constable was at last elected to full membership of the Royal Academy, only to be told by its President that he was 'peculiarly fortunate' to be chosen when there were History Painters on the list.
