Word: gainsborough
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Brook Watson and the Shark was Copley's only real contribution to European art. Actually the work of his London peers (Romney. Gainsborough. Reynolds, West) corrupted Copley's homespun realism. To compete in such fast and fashionable company, the old dog learned a pathetic array of new tricks. He kept on painting industriously until his death at 77, but his ice-clear eye gradually veiled, his granite-firm hand practiced soft flamboyance, his powers slipped away like spirits bored with too much worldliness, sick of success...
...18th and 19th centuries his landscapes influenced a whole generation of English painters. Sir Joshua Reynolds made copies of Rembrandt's paintings, and so did Gainsborough and Turner. Goya's studio had ten Rembrandt prints, to which Goya freely admitted his debt: "I have had three masters: Velasquez, Rembrandt, and nature." As the pendulum swung from classicism to romanticism in the 19th century, Delacroix seized on Rembrandt to best his classicist rival, Ingres, and wrote: "Perhaps we shall one day find that Rembrandt is a greater painter than Raphael...
...Raeburn, an orphaned son of a Scottish millowner and largely self-taught in art, had developed his own technique of painting to the point where, in the eyes of the local aristocracy, he was Scotland's greatest artist and the equal of London's Romney, Lawrence and Gainsborough. A Highland chief, when entertaining him, gave the command: "Bonnets off to Sir Henry Raeburn." To his studio in a steady procession came such famed countrymen as Diarist James Boswell, Economist Adam Smith, Philosopher David Hume and Novelist Sir Walter Scott. With complete self-assurance Raeburn painted them...
...English Portraitists: Gainsborough. Reynolds and Romney are returning to favor, though nowhere near the inflated level to which Lord Duveen, the famed Seeing Eye dealer for U.S. millionaires, pushed them during the boom of the 1920s. Then, wealthy Easterners (e.g., Andrew Mellon, Jules Bache) bought them; now, Texas oilmen do. The wide-ranging oilmen, one happy dealer explained last week, "prefer to buy their English pictures in England...
...Naked Emperors. Goya's foreign contemporaries -Guardi, Gainsborough, Fragonard-specialized in elegance. Goya did too, but instinctively pricked the bubbles he blew, fastening on the frivolous, pompous and stupid personalities inside the fine clothes of his noble sitters. Like the naked emperor of the fable, they seemed not to notice. Charles IV made him court painter and gave him a carriage. Occasionally Goya was commissioned to portray a beautiful woman, which enabled him to exhibit a warmer side. Friends who sat for him got off lightly; he could still admire...