GAINSBOROUGH, Thomas

Mary Robinson, n�e Darby (1757-1800) was an English poet and novelist. She was also known for her role as Perdita (heroine of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale) in 1779. It was during this performance that she attracted the notice of the young Prince of Wales, later King George IV of Great Britain and Ireland. Her affair with him ended in 1781, and “Perdita” Robinson was left to support herself through an annuity granted by the Crown (in return for some letters written by the Prince) in 1783 and through her writings. Today, she is remembered both as the first public mistress of George IV, and as a woman writer of the late 18th century.

This charming picture belongs to Gainsborough’s early period, when he was working in London and Suffolk. The theme of the conversation in a park evokes Watteau and his school; it denotes a French influence, which played a considerable part in the formation of the artist - he was in fact a pupil of the French engraver Gravelot at the St Martins Lane Academy. This picture has been thought to represent Thomas Sandby and his wife. At the Watson sale in 1832, it was described as depicting the artist and his wife. The painter’s marriage took place in 1746; a very similar work, Mr and Mrs Andrews, is dated 1748.

The open-air portrait is a familiar theme in the English school, whereas in eighteenth-century France the portrait is usually in an interior. The evocation of nature by the English portrait painters is on the whole conventional; it is quite another matter with Gainsborough, however, who has treated the landscape for its own sake.

Elizabeth Wrottesly (died 1822) was the second wife of Augustus Henry Fitzroy (1735-1811), Duke of Grafton. She was one of the ancestors of Diana, Princess of Wales.

Elizabeth and Thomas Linley belonged to a family of accomplished musicians from Bath, in England - she was a celebrated singer and he, a precocious violinist. Gainsborough knew the Linleys well and his affection for the brother and sister is evident in this engaging, sympathetic portrait. The sitters’ eyes shine and their finely painted features contrast with the loose brushwork of their hair, clothing, and rustic surroundings.

Isaac Henrique Sequeira was the physician of the painter Gainsborough. The refined style of this portrait comes close to that of Van Dyck as a reminder of his long stay at the English court.

The artist preferred the company of actors, artists, dramatists and musicians to that of politicians, writers or scholars, and was himself a talented amateur musician in addition to being a painter. Some of his finest portraits are of musicians and include the composer Karl Friedrich Abel (San Marino, Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery) and Johann Christian Bach.

Listen to an example of Johann Christian Bach’s music.

Johann Christian Fischer (1733-1800) was an outstanding musician. He was born in Germany at Freiburg-im-Breisgau and played for a time in the court band at Dresden before entering the service of Frederick the Great. On coming to London, where he is first recorded on 2 June 1768, he became a member of Queen Charlotte’s Band and played regularly at court. His performance of Handel’s fourth oboe concerto during the Handel Commemoration at Westminster Abbey in 1784 gave particular pleasure to George III. Regardless of such successes, he failed in 1786 to secure the post of Master of the King’s Band. He collapsed in 1800 while playing in a concert at court and died shortly afterwards.

Fischer was a composer and virtuoso oboist. His two-keyed oboe is visible on the harpsichord-cum-piano against which the musician leans. Fanny Burney praised the ‘sweet-flowing, melting celestial notes of Fischer’s hautboy,’ but the Italian violinist Felice de’ Giardini (1716-93) referred to Fischer’s ‘impudence of tone as no other instrument could contend with.’ In the portrait on the chair behind Fischer is a violin, on which he was apparently also an accomplished performer although only in private. The harpsichord-cum-piano, made by Joseph Merlin who came to London from the Netherlands in 1760 and established a successful business in the production of pianofortes, presumably refers to his abilities as a composer, as no doubt do the piles of musical scores.

This portrait of Johann Christian Fischer stands as testimony to Gainsborough’s own love of music. The artist preferred the company of actors, artists, dramatists and musicians to that of politicians, writers or scholars, and was himself a talented amateur musician in addition to being a painter. Gainsborough once wrote to William Jackson: ‘I’m sick of Portraits and wish very much to take my Viol da Gamba and walk off to some sweet Village when I can paint Landskips and enjoy the fag End of Life in quietness and ease.’ Yet some of his finest portraits are of musicians and include, in addition to that of Fischer, the composer Karl Friedrich Abel (San Marino, Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery) and Johann Christian Bach (Bologna, Museo Civico, Bibliografico Musicale). These two portraits date from the late 1770s, whereas that of Johann Christian Fischer was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1780.

Gainsborough seems to have known Fischer while he was still living in Bath (Fischer moved permanently to London in 1774). As early as 1775 Fischer evinced an interest in the artist’s elder daughter Mary (1748-1826), whom he married at St Ann’s Church, Soho, on 21 February 1780. The wedding was agreed to reluctantly by Gainsborough, who, although he admired Fischer as a musician, perhaps hoped that his elder daughter might make a better marriage, and lodged doubts about the musician’s character. He wrote to his sister on 23 February 1780: ‘I can’t say I have any reason to doubt the man’s honesty or goodness of heart, as I never heard anyone speak anything amiss of him; and as to his oddities and temper, she must learn to like as she likes his person, for nothing can be altered now. I pray God she may be happy with him and have her health.’ The marriage did not last and Mary gradually became insane. Whatever tensions Gainsborough might have been experiencing with regard to Fischer’s relationship with his daughter, Gainsborough’s portrait is masterly in its compositional sophistication, use of colour and sympathetic characterisation. It is clear, however, that the likeness has been painted over another portrait which will no doubt be revealed by X-ray. The portrait came into the Royal Collection indirectly. It appears to have been painted for Willoughby Bertie, 4th Earl of Abingdon (died 1799), a radical politician and a talented amateur musician, but was sold by his successor. Eventually it was acquired by Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, who in 1809 presented it to his brother, the Prince of Wales (later George IV). Both were admirers of Gainsborough’s work.

This work dates from Gainsborough’s mature period, when he resided in Bath as a fashionable portraitist of the aristocracy. Following the elegant Van Dyck tradition, he places the model in a broad landscape background. However, the strong contrasts of the lighting of the figure and the flashing effect achieved on the silk of her dress against the deep, impenetrable forest behind her, make this mysterious and poetic portrait a totally original work.

Lady Bate-Dudley was the wife of the newspaper publisher and art critic Sir Henry Bate-Dudley who since 1777 had been giving Gainsborough enthusiastic support in his articles. In 1780 he had the artist paint a life-size portrait of himself in a park landscape. When the portrait of his wife followed in 1787, Gainsborough once again chose the landscape situation, but had recourse to a classical Urania pose.

Lady Bate-Dudley is leaning against a garden monument with her legs crossed. The extended index finger of her left hand is touching her temple, a graceful, relaxed pose. In England, a natural form of dress had already by now become usual. Flowing around the body is a diaphanous veil which covers her coiffure. Her hair itself is no longer powdered, while skirts were only slightly “upholstered” and fabrics were allowed to fall loosely and playfully. The decollete was smaller, the bodice less rigid, and there was only a shawl about the hips. This new naturalness is the hallmark of Lady Bate-Dudley’s portrait. Gainsborough creates a virtuoso combination of this natural portraiture and the trees and shrubs of the garden ambience. The ensemble is supported by the interplay of the distant light with the close-up illumination. Lady Bate-Dudley appears as her own source of light in the picture.

Together with Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough was one of the artists who carried English landscape painting to its greatest heights in the 18th century. Portaiture and landscape were the two most important genres in 18th-century English art and became a symbol of national identity. Gainsborough worked in both genres with great success owing to the quality of his work. Indeed, he combined the two genres by using landscape backgrounds for his portraits.

Robert Andrews and his wife Frances Mary, n�e Carter, were married in 1748, not long before Gainsborough painted their portraits - and that of Auberies, their farm near Sudbury. The church in the background is St Peter’s, Sudbury, and the tower to the left is that of Lavenham church. The small full-length portrait in an open-air rustic setting is typical of Gainsborough’s early works, painted in his native Suffolk after his return from London; the identifiable view is unusual, and may have been specified by the patrons. We must not imagine that they sat together under a tree while Gainsborough set up his easel among the sheaves of corn; their costumes were most likely painted from dressed-up artist’s mannequins, which may account for their doll-like appearance, and the landscape would have been studied separately.

This kind of picture, commissioned by people ‘who lived in rooms which were neat but not spacious’, in Ellis Waterhouse’s happy phrase about Gainsborough’s contemporary Arthur Devis, was a speciality of painters who were not ‘out of the top drawer’. The sitters, or their mannequin stand-ins, are posed in ‘genteel attitudes’ derived from manuals of manners. The nonchalant Mr Andrews, fortunate possessor of a game licence, has his gun under his arm; Mrs Andrews, ramrod straight and neatly composed, may have been meant to hold a book, or, it has been suggested, a bird which her husband has shot. In the event, a reserved space left in her lap has not been filled in with any identifiable object.

Out of these conventional ingredients Gainsborough has composed the most tartly lyrical picture in the history of art. Mr Andrews’s satisfaction in his well-kept farmlands is as nothing to the intensity of the painter’s feeling for the gold and green of fields and copses, the supple curves of fertile land meeting the stately clouds. The figures stand out brittle against that glorious yet ordered bounty. But how marvellously the acid blue hooped skirt is deployed, almost, but not quite, rhyming with the curved bench back, the pointy silk shoes in sly communion with the bench feet, while Mr Andrews’s substantial shoes converse with tree roots. (The faithful gun dog had better watch out for his unshod paws.) More rhymes and assonances link the lines of gun, thighs, dog, calf, coat; a coat tail answers the hanging ribbon of a sun hat; something jaunty in the husband’s tricorn catches the corner of his wife’s eye. Deep affection and naive artifice combine to create the earliest successful depiction of a truly English idyll.

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 us, as the serious Reynolds seldom can. Suffolk-born, like Constable, he also became, within his means and times, a ‘natural painter’ - albeit of a very different kind. Although he said he wished nothing more than ‘to take my Viol de Gamba and walk off to 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 enchanted world, so that ‘nature’ comes to encompass silks and gauzes, ostrich feathers and powdered hair as much as woods and ponds and butterflies. But this rapturous manner of painting, in which all parts of a canvas were worked on together with a flickering brush, only appears in mature works, such as this famous and splendid picture.

In his early years in Sudbury, after his training in London restoring Dutch landscapes and working with a French engraver, Gainsborough’s finish was less free. After moving to the resort town of Bath in about 1759, he found a metropolitan clientele, and discovered Van Dyck in country-house collections. Both were to be decisive, and the effects are best judged in his portraits of women sitters, on the scale of life, in which elegance and ease of manner combine with a new, more tender colour range and a loosening of paint texture. In 1774 he moved permanently to London, where he built up a great portrait practice, but also began to paint imaginative ‘fancy pictures’ inspired by Murillo. He never aspired to ‘history painting’ in the Grand Manner. His poetry resides mainly in his brush, not in compositional inventiveness.

It was surely Gainsborough’s own inclination, however, to interpret a formal marriage portrait, for which the sitters probably sat separately, as a parkland promenade. William Hallett was 21 and his wife Elizabeth, n�e Stephen, 20 when they solemnly linked arms to walk in step together through life. A Spitz dog paces at their side, right foot forward like theirs, as pale and fluffy as Mrs Hallet is pale and gauzy. Being only a dog with no sense of occasion he pants joyfully hoping for attention. The parkland is a painted backdrop, like those of Victorian photographers, yet it provides a pretext for depicting urban sitters in urban finery as if in the dappled light of a world fresh with dew.

Suggested listening (streaming mp3, 5 minutes):

Edvard Grieg: Peter Gynt Suite No 1, Op, 46 (‘Morning Mood’)

Thomas Gainsborough rivaled Sir Joshua Reynolds as the leading portrait painter of 18th-century England. He publicly stylised his opposition in art-theoretical questions, but remained in a good working relationship with Reynolds. Gainsborough had begun his career as a provincial painter in Suffolk by copying landscapes and portraying the landed gentry. From 1759 to 1774 he worked in the society resort of Bath, where a high-ranking, increasingly enthusiastic clientele gave him well-paid commissions. In 1768 Gainsborough was one of the founder-members of the Royal Academy of Arts, and the only portraitist who was not based in London. Still, that was where his exalted clientele lived, and so that was where he moved in 1774, profiting also from the patronage of the royal family.

Mrs Elizabeth Edgar is depicted half-length, wearing a blue dress. The Edgar family lived at The Red House, an Elizabethan house at Westerfield, a few miles outside Ipswich and the family became one of Gainsborough’s most important patrons during his sojourn in Ipswich in the 1750s.

Following van Dyck’s prior example, Gainsborough developed towards a type of portrait in which, without losing his characteristic elegance and refinement, he arranged his sitters in simpler poses, as can be seen in the present work.

The vocation of Gainsborough, who spent most of his life outside the British capital, was landscape painting. In the studio he compiled real-life impressions, garnered during frequent strolls, into decorative compositions that recall the painted fantasies of French Rococo artist Antoine Watteau. Gainsborogh became famous for his portraits, however, which were prized especially for the exquisite consonance of their colours. This painting, whose subject is unknown, displays the artist’s characteristic harmonious blend of hues, here white and blue.

A cat in typically feline poses: alert, half-asleep, curled up snugly, and washing itself at great length. These cats by the English painter Gainsborough are extremely lifelike. This chalk drawing is unusual for him, for he seldom portrayed animals - most of his drawings were of landscapes and people. Tradition has it that the artist produced this drawing as a gift to his hostess while staying at her home. This would seem to be confirmed by the signature, for Gainsborough did not normally sign his drawings.

In this austere portrait of Squire John Wilkinson, late Gainsborough is seen at his best. Doubtless due to the sitter’s demand, this likeness is relatively restrained, even the setting is less glamorised than usual for the painter’s later phase (after 1774). Wilkinson, a manufacturer of cannon and founder of the British iron industry, was known as the ‘Great Staffordshire Ironmaster’; he was a self-proclaimed atheist and follower of Tom Paine.

This drawing forms part of a group of five full-length studies, each depicting beautifully dressed woman in a rural setting. Two of these drawings are in the British Museum, London, one is in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, while the fourth is now in the Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Thomas Gainsborough probably made these drawings as studies for The Richmond Water-Walk, a painting commissioned by King George III of England that was apparently never executed.

This unfinished picture was painted soon after the artist arred in Bath.

Gainsborough’s wife, the former Margaret Burr (1728-1798) may have been the illegitimate daughter of the duke of Bedford. Gainsborough’s early portraits are fresh and delicate, often in the contemporary French manner with a touch of van Dyck.

In the Rococo period all over Europe Watteau stood as symbol of a new gracefulness and ease: the proof that the painter can tackle apparently flippant subject-matter and yet be a great artist. Watteau’s own attitude was soon to matter no longer; he represented something which he might not always have wished to be. His compositions exercised an influence which was perhaps sometimes hardly conscious. A Frenchified grace in genre subjects was attempted everywhere, even in England.

The most personal response to Watteau is in Gainsborough, a great painter who yet seldom painted anything resembling a Watteau subject. Several of Gainsborough’s early portraits show him utilizing Watteau’s compositions for his sitters. But Gainsborough borrows more than a pose, as his later pictures confirm. It is freedom that exhales from his portraits: the freedom of nature and natural settings is allied to free handling, and the whole expresses the idiosyncratic character of his sitters, so relaxed and yet lively, just like Gainsborough’s own nature. The painter who described himself in a letter to a patron as ‘but a wild goose at best’ was dearly Watteau’s cousin, taking the same freedom for the artist as he expressed in his art, and conscious of being the odd man out in ordinary society. Gainsborough, if anyone, was the heir to Watteau’s art, but he was not to turn to the ‘fancy picture’ until late in life; and there would have been little patronage for an English painter producing fêtes galantes in preference to portraits.

In a number of small paintings datable to the mid-1760s, Gainsborough experimented with simple yet grand compositions, with increasing emphasis on the foliage. His practice of making these small model landscapes as a way of thinking through and carrying forward a design had become his preferred working method.