Thomas Gainsborough was an English portrait and landscape painter, draughtsman, and printmaker. Along with his rival Sir Joshua Reynolds, he is considered one of the most important British artists of the second half of the 18th century. He painted quickly, and the works of his maturity are characterised by a light palette and easy strokes. Despite being a prolific portrait painter, Gainsborough gained greater satisfaction from his landscapes. He is credited as the originator of the 18th-century British landscape school. Gainsborough was a founding member of the Royal Academy.
William Dobson was a portraitist and one of the first significant English painters, praised by his contemporary John Aubrey as "the most excellent painter that England has yet bred". He died relatively young and his final years were disrupted by the English Civil War.
George Vertue was an English engraver and antiquary, whose notebooks on British art of the first half of the 18th century are a valuable source for the period.
William Thomas Beckford was an English novelist, art critic, planter and politician. He was reputed at one stage to be England's richest commoner.
John Trumbull was an American painter and military officer best known for his historical paintings of the American Revolutionary War, of which he was a veteran. He has been called the "Painter of the Revolution". Trumbull's Declaration of Independence (1817), one of his four paintings that hang in the United States Capitol rotunda, is used on the reverse of the current United States two-dollar bill.
Events in the year 1810 in Art.
Francis Danby was an Irish painter of the Romantic era. His imaginative, dramatic landscapes were comparable to those of John Martin. Danby initially developed his imaginative style while he was the central figure in a group of artists who have come to be known as the Bristol School. His period of greatest success was in London in the 1820s.
Richard Earlom was an English mezzotinter.
Nebuchadnezzar is a colour monotype print with additions in ink and watercolour portraying the Old Testament Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II by the English poet, painter, and printmaker William Blake. Taken from the Book of Daniel, the legend of Nebuchadnezzar tells of a ruler who through hubris lost his mind and was reduced to animalistic madness and eating "grass as oxen".
Thomas Hearne was an English landscape painter, engraver and illustrator. Hearne's watercolours were typified by applying a wash of subtle subdued colours over a clear outline in fine brush, pen or pencil. His techniques were studied by younger artists such as Thomas Girtin and J. M. W. Turner.
Romanticism in Scotland was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that developed between the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. It was part of the wider European Romantic movement, which was partly a reaction against the Age of Enlightenment, emphasising individual, national and emotional responses, moving beyond Renaissance and Classicist models, particularly into nostalgia for the Middle Ages. The concept of a separate national Scottish Romanticism was first articulated by the critics Ian Duncan and Murray Pittock in the Scottish Romanticism in World Literatures Conference held at UC Berkeley in 2006 and in the latter's Scottish and Irish Romanticism (2008), which argued for a national Romanticism based on the concepts of a distinct national public sphere and differentiated inflection of literary genres; the use of Scots language; the creation of a heroic national history through an Ossianic or Scottian 'taxonomy of glory' and the performance of a distinct national self in diaspora.
Edward Vernon Utterson was a British lawyer, literary antiquary, collector and editor. He was a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, one of the original members of the Roxburghe Club, a member of the Athenaeum Club, Camden Society and Royal Society of Arts, Recorder of Chichester and a Trustee of the Royal Victoria Yacht Club. He went on to become one of the Six Clerks in Chancery, a position which he kept until his retirement on the abolition of the post in 1842, and also founded the Beldornie Press.
Belshazzar's Feast is an oil painting by British painter John Martin (1789–1854). It was first exhibited at the British Institution in February 1821 and won a prize of £200 for the best picture. It was so popular that it needed to be protected from the crowds by a railing, and established Martin's fame. In the words of Martin's biographer William Feaver, he "turned literary references to visual reality". Martin published mezzotint engravings in 1826 and 1832. The original painting is now held in a private collection; two smaller contemporaneous "sketches" are held by the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut and the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut.
The Bard. A Pindaric Ode (1757) is a poem by Thomas Gray, set at the time of Edward I's conquest of Wales. Inspired partly by his researches into medieval history and literature, partly by his discovery of Welsh harp music, it was itself a potent influence on future generations of poets and painters, seen by many as the first creative work of the Celtic Revival and as lying at the root of the Romantic movement in Britain.
James Jefferys was a British engraver and painter. His work was reassessed in the 1970s following the discovery of a lost set of drawings in Maidstone.
The Voice of the Ancient Bard is a poem written by the English poet William Blake. It was published as part of his collection Songs of Innocence in 1789, but later moved to Songs of Experience, the second part of the larger collection Songs of Innocence and of Experience, 1794.
Portrait of Banastre Tarleton is a 1782 portrait painting by the English artist Sir Joshua Reynolds. It depicts the British army officer Banastre Tarleton against a background scene of battle, referring to his recent service in the American War of Independence. Tarleton is shown in the uniform of the British Legion, a unit of American Loyalist cavalry which he had served with before surrendering at the Siege of Yorktown in 1781. Reynolds, President of the Royal Academy, was of the country's leading portraitists.
Alexander III of Scotland Rescued from the Fury of a Stag by the Intrepidity of Colin Fitzgerald is a 1786 history painting by the Anglo-American artist Benjamin West. It depicts a legendary scene in Scottish history in which the life of Alexander III of Scotland was saved during a hunting expedition from an attack by a stag by Colin Fitzgerald, who founded the Highland Clan Mackenzie. West was a noted American-born painter who settled in London in the 1760s and later went on to serve as the second president of the Royal Academy.
Visitor to a Moonlit Churchyard is a 1790 oil painting by the French-born British artist Philip James de Loutherbourg. It combines elements of Gothic and the emerging romantic art trend. It is also known as A Philosopher in a Moonlit Churchyard.
