THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH 1727-1788

              Instinctive, unpompous, drawn to music and the theatre more than to literature or his­tory, and to nature more than to anything, Gainsborough continues to enchant the view­ers, as the serious Reynolds seldom can. Although he said he wished nothing more than “to take my Viol de Gamba and walk off some sweet Village where I can paint Landskips”, his feeling for nature encom­passed much more than landscape. Children and animals, women and men, everything that dances, shimmers, breathes, whispers or sings, look natural in Gainsborough’s enchanting world, so that “nature” comes to encompass silks and gauzes, ostrich feath­ers and powdered hair as much as woods and ponds and butterflies.

            Thomas Gainsborough was born in the small market town of Sudbury in Suffolk on May 14, 1727. His father was a prosper­ous cloth merchant. There were nine chil­dren, five sons and four daughters of whom Gainsborough was the youngest. Gainsbor­ough went to Sudbury Grammar School, of which his uncle was then the master. When a boy he was very good at drawing, and ac­cording to a story about him, he made such a good portrait from memory of a thief whom he had seen robbing a garden that the thief was caught. At the age of 13, he persuaded his parents to let him go up to London to study. This would have been in 1740 or 1741. He remained an art student for four or five years.

             Gainsborough’s very early work must to a large extent have been associated with dec­orative arts. However, when he established his own studio in about 1745, his first ef­forts were small landscapes. He studied hard in the best school of the day, the London Salesroom, where landscapes by the Dutch 17^th-century artists were just beginning to appear. From them he learned the elements of pictorial composition. He supplied draw­ing for the young engraver and print-publisher John Bogdell*, and seemed to have been obliged to do back work for the art trade to supplement his income.

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* Bogdell, John (1719-1804) — English engraver, print pub­lisher and Lord Mayor of London

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              But he was in no danger of starving. On July 1746 he mar­ried Margaret Burr, a beautiful girl, who was, as their daughter said later, “a natural daughter of Henry, Duke of Beaufort, who settled 200 pounds a year upon her”, a not insubstantial annual income for the period.

               Doubtless, Gainsborough made visits to his native Suffolk in the summer months. Innumerable landscape sketches bear witness, that “Nature was his teacher and the woods of Suffolk his academy”. On October 1748, his father died, and he decided to return to Sudbury.

               One of his first pictures he painted in Suf­folk is among his masterpieces — the dou­ble portrait of Mr and Mrs Andrews (1748- 1749). Here was an opportunity to Gains­borough to display his powers as a land­scape painter, and it is no accident that, for the first time in this type of picture, the sitters have been withdrawn to one side of the canvas and the landscape given equal prominence.

               Soon after the birth of his younger daughter Margaret Gainsborough moved to Ipswich, a larger town which was not only a good deal more thriving commercially but a social and cultural centre of some consequences in East Anglia. Here he lived and worked, and brought up his young children, for seven years. For the most part he depended on lo­cal portraiture for his living.

                Sociable, convivial and warm hearted, Gains­borough was clearly much liked as a per­son. Many houses were always open to him, and their owners thought it an honour to entertain him. He was a member of the Ips­wich Musical Club. But, in spite of his pop­ularity and local prominence, work was not always easy to come by — demand was lim­ited in most provincial centres — and he was often in financial difficulties. Hence Gainsborough’s decision to try his fortune in Bath, a smart West Country spa rather than to risk in London.

                 The move took place in autumn of 1759. Business came in so fast that he was soon able to raise his prices. His painting changed as radically as his means. In the summer months, after he had finished his pictures for the annual exhibition of the Society of Artists in London Gainsborough was accus­tomed to spend much of his time out of doors, sketching and working on his land­scapes. The painter was very fond of visit­ing the country, from which he used to bring home roots, stones, and mosses, from which he formed, and then studied foregrounds in miniature. He now had an opportunity of seeing outstanding collections of old masters. Rubens and Van Dyck were the principal influences on his Bath style as it matured in the mid-1760s.

                Gainsborough’s landscape paintings gained a new amplitude in these years — a new breadth of chiaroscuro and a new richness of handling — and his position among his contemporaries was fully recognized, as it had not been earlier, he even refused to ac­cept topographical communities, which were the kind of landscape most in request, in­deed the almost indispensable staple of an 18^th-century landscape painter. Portrai­ture was his staple, and it remained a nec­essary one, for most of the landscapes Gains­borough sold were acquired by patrons who had become good friends, while a high pro­portion of his output remained in his hands.

               In 1768, Gainsborough was appointed one of the Directors of the Society of Artists, but begged leave to resign. The offer had come too late; he had already received a letter from Reynolds asking him to become a member of a new body, which was soon to eclipse the society of Artists, the Royal Academy.

                For the first Academy exhibition, in sum­mer 1769, Gainsborough painted one of his masterpieces, the full-length of the young and newly married Lady Molineaux. With its aristocratic Van Dyck pose, its exquisite softness of modelling and the quite excep­tional bravura handling of then satin dress, it must have created a sensation. But Gains­borough was never happy with what he called the “impudent style” necessitated by the competitiveness of public exhibitions. The natural concern that his pictures should be seen as they were meant to be seen was the cause of a row with the Academy in 1773: “I don’t send to the Exhibition this year; they hang my likeness too high to be seen”. He kept away four years.

               In 1774, Gainsborough left Bath for Lon­don. He was already well known to “the great world” and by Christmas 1775 he was writ­ing to his sister that “my present situation with regard to encouragement is all that heart can wish”. In 1777, he received the first of many commissions from the Royal Family — and returned triumphantly to the Academy: his portrait of Mrs Graham in Van Dyck dress is the most glamorous of his creations, while “The Watering Palace” was acclaimed as “by far the finest land­scape ever painted in England and equal to the great Masters”. From this time onwards his position as one of the leading British painters of the day was assured. He was able to buy works of art and owned three portraits by Van Dyck and a Rubens, which he copied.

               By 1777, Gainsborough possessed his own coach — his family went off to Suffolk in it, accompanied on horseback by their serv­ant, David. However, to avoid embarrass­ments caused by his wife’s surveillance of the purse-strings, he kept the prices of his landscapes, which he increased towards the end of the 1770s, a close secret from Mrs Gainsborough.

              In 1778, Gainsborough sent 11 portraits to the Academy. In fact he portrayed almost as wide a range of English society as Reynolds; it is the literary figures that are missing. His marriage portrait of the young Halletts was painted in what was recognized at the time as “une nouvelle stile”, the figures in­separable from the landscape in which they move, ribbons and bows and sketchiness of handling echoing the feathery foliage.

               Gainsborough succeeded as a portrait paint­er. Among his famous portraits are the por­trait of Mrs Siddons* and the picture known as “Blue Boy” — a boy in a blue costume. In his portrait of Mrs Sheridan (the wife of Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816)— the great Irish dramatist) we see a woman in light blue. A definite artificiality in Gains­borough’s painting constitutes his own style.

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*Siddons, Sarah (1755-1831) — English actress. Her majestic presence made her suited to tragic and heroic roles.

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              His portraits are painted in clear tones. His colour is always tender and soft. He always tended to cool scheme and blues predomi­nated in his paintings.

              From 1777, the year of “The Watering Pal­ace”, contemporary writers on Gainsborough were unanimous that “as a landscape paint­er, he is one of the first living”. But Gains­borough has become increasingly aware that he lacked the range profundity characteris­tic of Reynolds: “Damn him, how various he is.” In the last decade of his life he sought to deepen his expressive powers and to ex­tend the subject matter and appeal.

              It was cottage scenes, with groups of chil­dren, that became his most characteristic subjects, but from 1781 onwards, Gainsbor­ough developed a type of painting in which the rustic figures from the landscapes took on the scale of life. These “fancy” pictures of figures in sentimental attitude were whol­ly in tune with the times. The pictures were painted from living models, like “The Cot­tage Girl with Dog and Pitcher”.

             Contemporaries witnessed “if”. He found a character that he liked, “he ordered him to his house; and from the fields he brought into his painting-room, stumps of trees, weeds and animals of various kinds; and designed them not from memory, but im­mediately from the object”.

             Although best known as a portrait painter, Gainsborough preferred to paint landscape. He regarded the former as his profession and the latter as his pleasure. He continued to paint landscapes long after leaving the country for the city. He frequently made landscape compositions from memory and imagination, using studio arrangements of grasses, leaves and flowers. His arch-rival Reynolds referred to the style Gainsborough evolved for the painting of folliage as “fried parsley”. There was little love lost between the two, and rivalry between them ended only with Gainsborough’s death.

              About six years before his death Gainsbor­ough made a tour through West England. Music remained his principal form of re­laxation.

              In April 1788, Gainsborough made his first mention of a disease of which he had been conscious for some time past, and that was soon to prove fatal. On 2 August 1788 Gains­borough died at the age of 61. On his own request he was buried in Kew Churchyard next to the grave of his old Suffolk friend, Joshua Kirby.

               Reynolds said about Gainsborc gh, “... if ever this nation should produce genius sufficient to acquire to us the honourable distinction of an English School, the name of Gainsbor­ough will be transmitted to posterity, in the history of the Art, among the very first of that rising name”. Gainsborough was an un­complicated artist/craftsman, being no the­orist or intellectual, but his remarkable in­dividuality and sheer delight in painting shine through everything he produced.