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 Thomas Beckford was an English novelist, art collector, patron of decorative art, critic, travel writer, plantation owner and for some time politician. He was reputed at one stage to be England's richest commoner. The son of William Beckford and Maria Hamilton, daughter of the Hon. George Hamilton, he served as a Member of Parliament for Wells in 1784–1790 and Hindon in 1790–1795 and 1806–1820.
The Art Gallery of Ontario is an art museum in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The museum is located in the Grange Park neighbourhood of downtown Toronto, on Dundas Street West between McCaul and Beverley streets just east of Chinatown. The museum's building complex takes up 45,000 square metres (480,000 sq ft) of physical space, making it one of the largest art museums in North America and the second-largest art museum in Toronto after the Royal Ontario Museum. In addition to exhibition spaces, the museum also houses an artist-in-residence office and studio, dining facilities, event spaces, gift shop, library and archives, theatre and lecture hall, research centre, and a workshop.
The Barber Institute of Fine Arts is an art gallery and concert hall in Birmingham, England. It is situated in purpose-built premises on the campus of the University of Birmingham.
Wolverhampton Art Gallery is located in the City of Wolverhampton, in the West Midlands, United Kingdom. The building was funded and constructed by local contractor Philip Horsman (1825–1890), and built on land provided by the municipal authority. It opened in May 1884.
Joseph Duveen, 1st Baron Duveen, known as Sir Joseph Duveen, Bt., between 1927 and 1933, was a British art dealer who was considered one of the most influential art dealers of all time.
The Courtauld Gallery is an art museum in Somerset House, on the Strand in central London. It houses the art collection of the Courtauld Institute of Art, a self-governing college of the University of London specialising in the study of the history of art.
The Massacre of the Innocents is the subject of two paintings by Peter Paul Rubens depicting the episode of the biblical Massacre of the Innocents of Bethlehem, as related in the Gospel of Matthew (2:13-18). The first, measuring 142 x 182 cm, was painted after his return to his native Antwerp in 1608, following eight years spent in Italy.
Mr and Mrs Andrews is an oil on canvas portrait of about 1750 by Thomas Gainsborough, now in the National Gallery, London. Today it is one of his most famous works, but it remained in the family of the sitters until 1960 and was very little known before it appeared in an exhibition in Ipswich in 1927, after which it was regularly requested for other exhibitions in Britain and abroad, and praised by critics for its charm and freshness. By the post-war years its iconic status was established, and it was one of four paintings chosen to represent British art in an exhibition in Paris celebrating the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. Soon the painting began to receive hostile scrutiny as a paradigm of the paternalist and capitalist society of 18th-century England, but it remains a firm popular favourite.
Samson and Delilah is a painting long attributed to the Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) and displayed in the National Gallery. It dates from about 1609 to 1610.
Mildred Anne Butler was an Irish artist, who worked in watercolour and oil of landscape, genre and animal subjects. Butler was born and spent most of her life in Kilmurry, Thomastown, County Kilkenny and was associated with the Newlyn School of painters.
Frank Porter Wood was a Canadian businessman and philanthropist. He is best remembered for his many gifts and bequests of artworks to the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.
Sir Peter Paul Rubens was a Flemish artist and diplomat from the Duchy of Brabant in the Southern Netherlands. He is considered the most influential artist of the Flemish Baroque tradition. Rubens's highly charged compositions reference erudite aspects of classical and Christian history. His unique and immensely popular Baroque style emphasized movement, colour, and sensuality, which followed the immediate, dramatic artistic style promoted in the Counter-Reformation. Rubens was a painter producing altarpieces, portraits, landscapes, and history paintings of mythological and allegorical subjects. He was also a prolific designer of cartoons for the Flemish tapestry workshops and of frontispieces for the publishers in Antwerp.
Portrait of Isaak Abrahamsz. Massa is a 1626 painting by Frans Hals that is in the collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario. It depicts Isaac Massa, a prosperous merchant and a close friend of Hals. Massa was the subject of an earlier work by Hals – Isaak Abrahamsz Massa and Beatrix van der Lean – which also featured his wife. Massa would commission another portrait by Hals in 1635.
Thomas Barker or Barker of Bath, was a British painter of landscape and rural life.
The Portrait of Marchesa Brigida Spinola-Doria is an oil-on-canvas painting by Flemish artist Sir Peter Paul Rubens, dating to 1606. It is now in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., part of the Samuel H. Kress Collection. It was commissioned by Marchese Giacomo Massimiliano Doria of Genoa and shows his wife shortly after their wedding in 1605; she came from the equally prominent Spinola family. He died in 1613 and she remarried another Doria. It has been trimmed several times on each side, removing the garden shown in the background and the lower part of the figure.
Portrait of a Commander or A Commander Being Dressed for Battle is a portrait of an unknown man in plate armour, by Peter Paul Rubens. In July 2010 it was sold for £9 million by Christie's after Sotheby's turned it down, suspecting its authenticity as a Rubens. In December 2011, the portrait was placed on loan with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Gainsborough's House is the birthplace of the leading English painter Thomas Gainsborough. It is now a museum and gallery, located at 46 Gainsborough Street in Sudbury, Suffolk, England. Some of the pictures on display have been acquired with the help of the Art Fund.
Manuel Osorio Manrique de Zúñiga is a large full-length portrait in oil painted in 1787–88 by the Spanish artist Francisco Goya. It depicts a boy three or four years of age, standing in red clothes, with birds and cats. It is also known as Goya's "Red Boy". It was described by art historian Claus Virch in 1967 as "one of the most appealing and successful portraits of children ever painted, and also one of the most famous". The painting has been held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since 1949.
Hugh Graham Belsey, MBE, is a British art historian who is an authority on the art of Thomas Gainsborough. For 23 years he was the curator of Gainsborough's House in Sudbury. His most recent contribution to Gainsborough scholarship is his catalogue raisonné of Gainsborough's portraits published in February 2019 by the Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
