River Landscape

Thomas Gainsborough was an English portrait and landscape painter. He was born the youngest son of John Gainsborough, a weaver in Suffolk, and, in 1740, left home to study art in London with Hubert Gravelot, Francis Hayman, and William Hogarth. In 1746, he married Margaret Burr, and the couple became the parents of two daughters. He moved to Bath in 1759 where fashionable society patronised him, and he began exhibiting in London. In 1769, he... became a founding member of the Royal Academy, but his relationship with the organization was thorny and he sometimes withdrew his work from exhibition. Gainsborough moved to London in 1774, and painted portraits of the King and Queen, but the King was obliged to name as royal painter Gainsborough's rival Joshua Reynolds. In his last years, Gainsborough painted relatively simple landscapes and is credited as the originator of the 18th century British landscape school. Gainsborough died of cancer in 1788 and is interred at St. Anne's Church, Kew, Surrey. He painted quickly and his later pictures are characterised by a light palette and easy strokes.
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The Philadelphia Museum of Art has collections of more than 227,000 objects that include "world-class holdings of European and American paintings, prints, drawings and decorative arts" and is among the largest art museums in the United States. Its main building is located at the west end of Philadelphia's Benjamin Franklin Parkway, near the south end of Fairmount Park and is visited by more than 800,000 people annually. Other museum sites... include the Rodin Museum, also located on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, the Perelman Building, across the street from the Main Building, and several other historic sites. The Ruth and Raymond G. Perelman Building opened in 2007 and houses some of the Museum's more popular collections, as well as over 200,000 books and periodicals and 1.6 million other documents. The Museum was established in 1876 in conjunction with the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Fairmount Park. Originally called the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art, and housed in the Centennial Exposition's Memorial Hall, it opened its doors to the public on May 10, 1877.
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