Step 3: Punctuation and Logic

Exercise 1:

Thomas gainsborough

(1727-1788)

Thomas Gainsborough was one of the greatest English portrait and landscape painters. He was also regarded as one of the greatest technicians and colorists in the history of Western painting. Gainsborough's portrait of The Honourable Mrs. Graham was exhibited in 1777. (3)

Gainsborough enjoyed ex­perimenting with new techniques as well as new subject matter. He did not often try to imitate other artists, as did some English painters of his time.(2)

He was born at Sudbury, in Suffolk. As a boy he was very good at drawing and, according to one story, he made such a good portrait from memory of a thief who he had seen robbing an orchard that the man was identified by it. (2)

Gainsborough's father sent him as an appren­tice to a French painter and engraver, Gravelot, in London, where he learned the art of etching on copper plates. During the time he was in London, he also studied the paintings of the Dutch landscape artists of the 17th century. (2)

In 1745 he went home to Sudbury, hoping to do landscape painting, but few people were willing to buy paintings of their country houses and gardens, so he painted portraits to earn his living. Among his early portraits is the remarkable Mr. and Mrs. Andrews (1748-49), which is in the National Gallery, London. The background to the portrait is a beautiful landscape. (2)

In 1759 Philip Thicknesse, who later wrote his life story, persuaded him to move to Bath, the center of the social life of the time, and arranged for him to be introduced to rich and important visitors. Gainsborough quickly established himself as a fashionable portrait painter. One masterpiece of his Bath period is The Blue Boy (1770), which is in the Hunting-ton Library and Art Gallery, at San Marino, California, in the United States. In 1768 he was one of the first members of the newly founded Royal Academy. (3)

Gainsborough moved to London in 1774. There he painted many famous people, including King George III, Richard Brinsley Sheridan the playwright, Dr. Samuel John-son the writer, Mrs. Siddons the great actress, and the statesmen William Pitt and Edmund Burke. (2)

Yet it was as a landscape painter that Gainsborough had a lasting influence on later generations of English artists. His influence on English portrait painters was rather small compared with that of his rival, Sir Joshua Reynolds. (2)

Exercise 2:

Composers who wrote in the Enlightenment and the Romantic periods are now called Classical. Their work often reflected the beliefs of both eras. Composers, such as Haydn, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, reflected the Enlightenment in elegant, carefully constructed, logical symphonies that produced breathtaking emotional effects. Enlightenment artists and architects were inspired by these ideas of humanism, by mathematical reason, and by the patterns of nature, as well as its innocence. This is evident in the poignant but heroic drawings of common people, in the layout of the Versailles gardens, and in the peaceful landscape paintings produced at this time.