Product Description
This work gathers all the known letters of the 18th-century British painter, Gainsborough, and connects them with a narrative of Gainsborough's life. The 110 letters, which include correspondence with Gainsborough's family and friends, are supplemented by 36 documents in the artist's own hand. ... Read more

Product Description
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishings Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the worlds literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

Product Description
This book an EXACT reproduction of the original book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
Publisher: London, BentleyPublication date: 1887Subjects: Art -- BiographyNotes: This is an OCR reprint. There may be typos or missing text. There are no illustrations or indexes.When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. You can also preview the book there. ... Read more

Product Description
This scarce antiquarian book is a selection from Kessinger Publishing’s Legacy Reprint Series. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment to protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature. Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

Product Description
Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone! ... Read more

Product Description
This is an EXACT reproduction of a book published before 1923. This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words.This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book. ... Read more

Product Description
Major exhibitions in London, Washington, and Boston in 2003 will focus attention on and boost public interest in Gainsborough, one of England's greatest eighteenth-century painters. This unique collection presents 16 of his most famous works--including the enormously popular "The Blue Boy"--as stickers. Ideal for dozens of decorative uses. Dover Original.
... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Proving it is a Gainsborough
A British Actress finds a painting in a theatre.A picture of an actor & she sets out to prove it is a Gainsborough.

Written in diary form....It is her first book and a good one. I love the Art freference, art world critics and especially the Bank information that is available.Great book!

The author actress is in a movie entitled The River, if you would like to see her as an actress. ... Read more

Product 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

Customer Reviews (2)

The sympathetic and agreeable Mr. Gainsborough
This is an inexpensive and well-written introduction to one of the most beloved of British painters. Gainsborough emerges as a very human and fun-loving artist who above all else wanted to paint landscapes. He was an important influence on such painters as Constable, Turner, Goya and Delacroix, and is one of the greatest landscape painters of all time (see his lyrical Suffolk landscape c. 1750 now hanging in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna).

We learn in this book about the painter's eccentric family and his rise from provincial painter to artistic genius. The book also outlines something of Gainsborough's unique technique, and how the painter would achieve a likeness in a portrait by studying the subject in low-light in order not to get distracted by small details.

Gainsborough was also very musical, and possibly loved music as much as painting. He had an almost pathological interest in musical instruments and was a keen amateur musician. Gainsborough painted many important musicians and composers, including Johann Christian Bach (son of the great John Sebastian).

There is an endearing anecdote in the book about how the young and impish Gainsborough was not fully respected at his local music (i.e. drinking) club. Specifically, "...Gainsborough was the [...] of jokes and had his wig thrown about the room." As Constable would observe, "...they did not seem to know who they had amongst them until he had left."

The book also features some of the sensitive portayals Gainsborough made of his two surviving daughters (an older daughter had died tragically in infancy), made all the more poignant by the distressing realisation that both girls would eventually suffer from mental illness as they reached their twenties.

Despite the relatively modest size of the book (8.4 x 6.0 Inches), the quality of the colour reproductions are excellent. However, like Rembrandt, Gainsborough's work suffers especially from reproduction and needs to be seen in the flesh in order to appreciate the brushstrokes and unique handling of paint. We learn that Gainsborough intended the viewer to look up close to his work to get a view of the apparently random and chaotic brush strokes, and then to move back and watch the picture "fall into place" as the more distant perspective allows the subject to form. Apparently he fell out with the Royal Academy because his paintings were not placed at eye-level for the annual exhibitions and thus did not allow for such close scrutiny.

This book has made me a fan of this wonderful, approachable and lyrical painter. Highly recommended.

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

Product Description
Thomas Gainsborough was one of the most brilliant and original portrait painters of the 18th-century, surpassing his great rival Reynolds with his abilty to capture a likeness and his superb handling of the paint. He was also a talented and sensitive landscape painter and has been hailed as the father of the British landscape school, paving the way for artists such as Constable and Turner. This book analyzes Gainsborough's technique and subject matter, and explores his artistic environment, his important contemporaries and issues such as the patronage of artists in 18th-century England. This book contains a survey of Gainsborough's most famous works, including "Mr and Mrs Andrews" and "The Blue Boy". ... Read more

Product Description
This book explores the National Gallery of Scotland's world famous portraitThe Honourable Mrs Grahamby 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 Grahamcomprehensively 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. ... Read more