The Art of Thomas Gainsborough by Michael Rosenthal

Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, February 11- May 2006. Exhibition schedule: Yale Center for British Art, October 6-December 2005. To this end contributors to the volume investigate new viewing practices associated with sensibility, the meaning of the cottage for Gainsborough and his contemporaries, the artist's creation of affecting landscapes through the use of peasant subjects, and his theatrical treatment of these subjects in order to heighten his viewers' emotional responses. This lovely book brings together the cottage door paintings and essays that discuss Gainsborough's departure from the more naturalistic style of his earlier career and that place his new concern with sentimentalism and artificiality in the context of sensibility and the growing interest in expressive, even sensational, visual spectacles. As a way of seeing, sensibility valued nature for its innocence and simplicity, and images, such as Gainsborough's cottage subjects, for their power to move the viewer. Published to accompany a major exhibition at the Tate Britain the text aims to demonstrate the sheer range, quality. This work looks at the art of Thomas Gainsborough, widely acknowledged as one of the great masters of the 18th century. Often seen as exemplars of the rural idyll, these works were among the first landscape paintings to reflect the eighteenth-century aesthetic of sensibility. Gainsborough : Rosenthal, Michael, Myrone, Martin, Rosenthal, Michael, Myrone, Martin: : Books. Late in his career Thomas Gainsborough became preoccupied with the theme of the cottage door, and he created a group of paintings and drawings that show rustic figures clustered around the open door of a cottage set in a deeply wooded landscape. Magic, spectacle and the art of de Loutherbourg's eidophusikon / Iain McCalman.Gainsborough's Cottage door in Sir John Leicester's 'tent room' / Ann Bermingham.The early collectors of The cottage door / Dongho Chun.Gainsborough's cottage-door scenes: aesthetic principles, moral values / Amal Asfour and Paul Williamson.

Gainsborough's cottage doors: a matter of modernity / Michael Rosenthal.

Spectacles for republicans / John Barrell.

'Innocence and health': nursing women in Gainsborough's cottage-door paintings / Susan Sloman.Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (p.

The Art of Thomas Gainsborough by Michael Rosenthal