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Файл:Практикум по культуре речевого общения искусство. Часть 1. Практикум
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frogs, for monseers, and wooden shoes in general, for foreign fiddlers, foreign singers, and above
all, for foreign painters, whom he held in the most amusing contempt.
(From The English Humourists of the Eighteenth Century by W.M. Thackeray)
2.9. The opening scene is made easy to “read” by its many clues. The Earl of Squanderfield,
old and gouty, points to the record of ancient ancestry in the pictured family tree as a bargaining
counter in the transaction that brings him banknotes and gold. Through the window one sees the
product of his own reckless expenditure, a pretentious building left unfinished through want of
funds. The alderman, shrewd in the ways of commerce, gives careful scrutiny to the marriage
contract. The nobleman’s son lounges by a mirror in narcissistic complacence. The alderman’s
daughter sits sulkily apart, listening to the compliments of the lawyer, “Silvertongue”.
There follows the famous scene of weariness and disillusion, shortly after marriage. The
action explains itself. The interior setting, beautifully painted, seems likely to have been derived
from one of the mansions in Arlington Street. Statesmen and members of the nobility lived there
and Hogarth may have drawn on his memory of No. 5, the townhouse of Sir Robert Walpole, where
he died in 1745.
That the estrangement between the young Earl of Squanderfield (who by now has inherited
the title) and his Countess is practically complete, is the burden of the two following scenes, the
Visit to the Quack Doctor and, The Countess’s Morning Levee. The Earl taking his own dissipated
way has, it can only be concluded, acquired from or transmitted to the young girl with him some
form of venereal disease that the quack doctor has professed to cure. He is the Doctor Misaubin
who made an earlier appearance in A Harlot’s Progress, also known as Monsieur Pillule who
receives them in his house in St. Martin’s Lane, amid a miscellany of the objects respected by the
superstitious and credulous as possessing some magical value.
Meanwhile the Countess has her own diversions in the morning gathering in her boudoir
while a French hairdresser puts her hair in curling papers. Music is provided by foreign musicians
of the kind Hogarth heartily disliked. A woman visitor leans forward in affected adoration. It must
be the Earl himself with his hair in curlers who directs a sour morning look towards the Countess as
she discusses the costume to the night’s masked ball with the ever-attentive Silvertongue, indolently
and even insolently at ease on the couch beside her.
Details are as always significant. The collection of trumpery ornaments she has bought at an
auction includes the horned statuette of Actaeon, which in the circumstances takes on an extra
meaning. A copy of Correggio’s Jupiter and Io adds its voluptuousness to the framed pictures
among which the portrait of Silvertongue figures. She has been reading the latest French novel, just
out, Le Sopha. This frivolous fairy tale about an Oriental courtier who incurred the punishment of
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being turned into a sofa and, as such, told what he saw and heard, gains suggestiveness from lying
on the couch where the amorous lawyer reclines.
The last two scenes, of murder and suicide, bring the tensions of the series to their climax. In
the Killing of the Earl there is an instantaneous impression of things happening in a moment of
time. The Earl has surprised the Countess and her lover in the house of assignation they have gone
to after the masked ball. Held in suspense are the few minutes in which the Earl, mortally wounded
by Silvertongue’s panic thrust, staggers, his falling sword hanging for a second in space: his
murderer escapes through the window in his shirt, the Countess wrings her hands in horror, the
landlord and the watch burst in through the door.
The death scene of the Countess, who takes poison after learning that her lover has been
tried for murder and hanged, is in her father’s house to which she had returned. The alderman lives
in an old-fashioned residence in the City near the Thames. The casement opens on the old London
Bridge, surviving (until 1757) in all its tottering antiquity. His taste in pictures is for the Dutch and
Flemish schools.
There is nothing more left to do for the doctor who is seen departing. The apothecary scolds
the idiot servant who has brought the fatal bottle of laudanum, now lying empty on the floor. The
old nurse holds up the frail, rickety child to its dead mother in vain. With his business-like prudence
and no sign of emotion her father takes the ring from her finger for safe keeping. On no stage play
could the final curtain be drawn with more effect.
(From The World of William Hogarth by William Gaunt)
2.10. Hogarth’s Portrait of Captain Coram. Hogarth painted his portrait of Captain Coram
in 1740, and donated it the same year to the Foundling Hospital. It was painted on Hogarth’s own
initiative, without having been commissioned, and was presented to a charitable institution in the making,
one of whose founder members Hogarth was, and it depicts a friend of his, the prime mover of the whole
undertaking. The very format of the picture shows that Hogarth was exerting all his powers to produce
a masterpiece. It measures about 2.4 by 1.5 metres, the biggest portrait Hogarth ever painted. In
producing a work like this, of monumental proportions, where there was no purchaser to distort the
artist’s intentions, Hogarth must have had a definite aim or aims, and it is probable that he desired his
work to express some thing of significance to him at this period of time.
The portrait is conceived in the great style, with foreground plus repoussoir, middle-ground,
background, classical column and drapery. Coram is depicted sitting on a chair, which is placed on a
platform with two steps leading up to it.
Hogarth makes use of the conventional scheme, traditional in portraits of rulers and noblemen,
with its column, drapery and platform as laudatory symbols to stress the subject’s dignity, a
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composition, which in the England of that time, was usually associated with Van Dyck’s much admired
but old-fashioned portraits of kings and noblemen.
Hogarth’s painting, with its attributes and symbols is not far removed from history painting.
But the subject is a sea captain, whose social position did not, by the fixed conventions for this category
of picture, entitle him to this kind of portrayal. His relatively modest position in society is emphasized
by his simple dress, a broad coat of cloth, by the absence of the wig obligatory for every person of standing,
and by the intimacy and realism with which the artist has depicted this figure with his broad, stocky
body, whose short, bent legs do not reach the floor.
The mode of depiction refers back to, and creates in the beholder an expectation of a
somewhat schematized and idealized manner of human portrayal. But by depicting Coram in an
intimate and realistic fashion Hogarth breaks the mould. In one and the same work he has made use of the
means of expression of both the great and the low style. By making apparent the low social status of his
subject, Hogarth seems also to wish to breach the classic doctrine, whose scale of values provided the
foundation of the theories about the division of painting into distinct categories, where the nature of the
theme determined a picture’s place on the scale “high” to “low”.
(From William Hogarth’s Portrait of Captain Coram by Hildegard Omberg)
3. Thomas Gainsborough
3.1. Painter and Musician. If Reynolds was the solid prose of that age of prose, its
incipient poetry was with the man whose name is so often coupled and contrasted with his: Thomas
Gainsborough. He, too, succeeded, and succeeded brilliantly, as a portrait painter. [...] Society went
to him for portraits, and his insight into the phases of womanhood made him essentially the woman’s painter. A good amateur violinist and a lover of the drama, he was essentially an artistic
person. One of his greatest friends was Sheridan, the dramatist; and his portraits of actors and
actresses are among his most famous. Full in the centre of the gay world of the time, therefore he
basked in the light of success, at least so far as the portraits were concerned. The time was not yet
ripe for fashionable people to spend money on landscapes, and it is remarkable that despite his
acceptance, there were more than forty unsold landscapes in his studio, at the time of his death. Yet
it was landscape which had his heart.
Even in the portraits he is an out-of-door painter. As one thinks of the finest of his portrait
paintings with the brilliant spontaneity in the handling of the figure, the power to put down his own
transient impression of the sitters, one is reminded that the backgrounds are well-observed country
scenes. The famous Blue Boy, idealized, Van Dyckian, highly personal impression of the lovely
child, is posed against an open sky and a sylvan landscape falling away to counterbalance the pose
of the figure. The Morning Walk, another idealized portrait of Squire Hallet and his wife, again has
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the beauty of the landscape as a foil to the extreme artifice of their dress. In his picture of Mrs.
Graham (that treasure of the National Gallery of Scotland), even though she is posed against a
classic pillar, we have beyond her the open country and trees. To Gainsborough the proper study of
mankind is not entirely man.
One of the most fascinating of Gainsborough’s works, unfinished though it is, is the study of
his Two Daughters, which we have in the National Gallery. Would he have lost that spontaneous
lyric charm had he completed the picture? With Gainsborough we are more sure than with almost
any of his contemporaries. It is the innate nature of his work that he managed to keep in freshness to
the end. Always there is the vital feeling of the first sketch underlying the finished art. In its
unfinished state it is an exquisite study of young girlhood. Its light tone scheme and use of light
blues and yellows belongs essentially to the Ipswich period. Later, when he came into contact with
the Van Dyck pictures, he enriched his palette, but he invariably kept his scheme cool, preferring
blues where Sir Joshua tends to reds and rich browns. In such a master-work as the glorious Mrs.
Siddons of the National Gallery the prevailing colour is blue, but it loses nothing in richness against
any work in more intimate colour. There is a kind of English reserve about Gainsborough blues,
which belong essentially to his spirit.
In the evolution of the art of painting Gainsborough’s actual method of putting on paint is an
important step. Consciously or subconsciously he may have found the trick of it in the works of
Rubens or those of Watteau. Unquestionably it grew out of his own careful observation of nature
and the volatile urge of his own mind and hand. The method consisted in putting tiny touches of
pure colour on to the canvas so that the colour–mixing takes place not on the palette but as a
phenomenon of optics between the canvas and the eye of the beholder. The result is vibrant, pure
colour, which seems made of light itself rather than of pigment. With that he saw how full of
reflected light the shadows were, and he painted them largely as he saw them. Thus in the Watering
Place landscape at the Tate Gallery we find shadows that belong rather to the impressionists of the
next century than to the matter-of-fact XVIII.
Nearly a century later when scientists were making advances in optics and spectroscopy, this
method of painting became a formula in the hands of the great impressionists. With Gainsborough
the basis was less scientific than the result of a quick nervous temperament in urgent search for an
expression of immediate and, maybe, transient aspect of truth.
The linear rhythm, the broken pure colour, the vibration of colours meeting only as the eye
takes them in: these things were instinctive advances which Gainsborough made in this art.
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Look at his famous Harvest Waggon. The swinging line of the waggon and horses, the
spontaneity of the figures, the gleam of sunlight, between the trees, the plunging horse: a vision
fleeting but momentarily perfect.
In his work there is at its best that sense of immediacy of contact with beauty. In the
portraits it is in the catching of a flash of a personality, in the landscapes it is in the moment of light
and shadow as some sun gleam and cloud shadow renders a landscape suddenly momentarily
unfamiliar and thereby dramatic. Look at the Dedham landscape in the National Gallery. It belongs
to the early days when he is not yet emancipated from the light brushwork of the Dutch masters, but
it is a flash of insight into familiar scene. English landscape painting grew to mean this. The old
classic calm, the assembly of correct elements of distant mountains, castle, trees and all-pervading
sunlight was not to be the English contribution to the art. Gainsborough was here again one of the
pioneers. In his search for the spontaneous expression of the effects which appealed to him he
would use oil-colour as if it were water-colour, building up with those light feathery brush strokes
in the pure colour we associate with all his work.
Not for nothing was the master a musician. His painting has a quality belonging to this most
abstract and fleeting of arts.
(From The British Masters: a Survey and Guide by H. Shipp)
3.2. Gainsborough turned to the Old Masters, especially to Van Dyck. To this study he
brought an innate genius for drawing that Reynolds never possessed, and a sensuous delight in
colour and movement that seems at times to amount to almost an intoxication with them. No other
painter has thus caught, at his best, the essence of silks and lace in motion, nor the tremulous flicker
of an eyelash. In contrast to Reynolds’, the essence of his genius was intuitive, the touch of the
brush getting ever lighter, the atmosphere ever more aerial. The particular discovery of
Gainsborough was the creation of a form of art in which the sitters and the background merge into
a single entity. The landscape is not kept in the background, but in most cases man and nature are
fused in a single whole through the atmospheric harmony of mood. It is no accident that in the
works of Gainsborough’s late maturity the figures blend with the background to such an extent that
they become almost transparent. This effect was possible only by situating the figures in the
background, not in order to add an element to the portrait but with the sole purpose of achieving the
greatest possible degree of spontaneity. It was this same striving for spontaneity which prevented
Gainsborough from portraying his society people in historical costume or striking attitudes. This
was a distinct innovation at a time when the whole tradition was to extol an ideal and historical
concept of beauty, to abandon nature and embrace artificiality.
Each of Gainsborough’s portraits is distinct and individual, even though taken as a whole,
they depict an entire society in its significant manifestations. Gainsborough’s truthful and subtle
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rendering of character is typical of his portrait painting. His special insight into the psychology of
women make him essentially the woman’s painter.
One of the most fascinating of his works is the study of his Two Daughters. In its unfinished
state it is an exquisite study of young girlhood. Its light colour scheme of blues and yellows belongs
to his early period. Later he enriched his palette, but he invariably kept his scheme cool, preferring
blues. In such a masterpiece as the glorious Mrs Siddons the prevailing colour is blue, but it loses
nothing in richness against any work in more intimate colour. There is a kind of English reserve
about Gainsborough’s blues, which belong essentially to his spirit.
Gainsborough’s painting is not overburdened by too scrupulous an observance of rules and
precepts. The immediacy and spontaneity which are present in nature are present also in his work,
to the extent of giving the impression that the artist’s supreme ability consists in making even the
most artificial elements appear entirely natural and spontaneous.
Emphasis is nearly always placed on the season in both the landscape and the portraits, from
the time of Gainsborough’s early works until the years of his late maturity. In his most famous early
painting Robert Andrews and Mary, His Wife Gainsborough shows the pleasure of resting on a
rustic bench in the cool shade of an oak tree, while all around the ripe harvest throbs in a hot
atmosphere enveloped in a golden light. In his late work The Market Cart, painted in 1786–1787,
that is shortly before Gainsborough’s death, the season is autumn, and the picture is penetrated
throughout by the richness and warmth of colour of this season, by its scents of drenched earth and
marshy undergrowth. Contrasts of light and shade in a context of flowing, curved and broken lines,
produce an impression of animation and mobility which is the characteristic of Gainsborough’s art.
This mobility is directly connected with his technique of seizing an effect in a rapid stroke, so that a
beauty of form emerges from his bold execution and masterly technique. A mobile and weightless
quality is found also in the background details and the draperies, where vibrant patches of light
have a fluid translucent consistency which recalls the manner of Rubens and anticipates Goya. The
formal elements of the painting – colours and lines – thus become expressive in their own right,
Gainsborough is the purest lyricist of English painters, Reynolds – the master of the epic style.
3.3. When Gainsborough made his often-quoted remark about Reynolds, “Damn him, how
various he is”, he was glancing, we may suppose, at the peculiar skill by which his great rival ran
the whole gamut of portrait painting, from “mere heads” to the most elaborate poetic and allegorical
fantasies. Gainsborough himself had no such variety, but painted his sitters, commonly, in their
habit as they lived. Yet, in a larger sense, he was far more various than Reynolds. He excelled in
two distinct branches of the art, portraiture and landscape, and revealed an unequalled success in
combining the two – that is, in adjusting the human figure to a background of natural scenery.
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Moreover, he excelled in conversation pieces, animal painting, seascapes, genre and even
still life. Such was his peculiar variety.
Gainsborough’s personality was also more vivid and various than that of Sir Joshua. He was
excitable, easily moved to wrath and as readily appeased, generous and friendly with all who loved
music and animals and the open air. He had not Reynolds’s gift of suffering fools gladly. Although
he painted at court, he was not a courtly person, but preferred to associate with musicians, simple
folk, and, on occasion, with cottagers. His most engaging pictures are those of persons with whom
he was intimate or at ease. His grand sitters seem a little glacial, for all the perfection of the
painter’s technique, as though a pane of glass was between them and the artist.
The methods of the two painters are sufficiently indicated by their respective treatment of
Mrs. Siddons. Reynolds, when the portrait was finished, signed his name along the edge of her robe,
in order to send his name “down to posterity on the hem of her garment”. Gainsborough made no
attempt, as he had no wish, to record the art of “Queen Sarah”; but he was interested in the woman
as she rustled into his studio in her blue and white silk dress. Her hat, muff and fur delighted him,
and he proceeded to paint her as though she were paying him a call. As an actress, she was one of
those sitters with whom he could be informal; and while drawing her striking profile, he is said to
have remarked, “Damn it, madam, there is no end to your nose”. The man who made such a remark
was, clearly, no courtier, but a brusque and friendly being, concerned to rid his sitter of all sense of
restraint. For a painter’s studio is to the sitter a nerve-racking place.
Gainsborough had from the first shown peculiar skill in representing his sitters as out-ofdoors, and thus uniting portraiture with landscape. In his youth he had painted a portrait of Mr. and
Mrs. Andrews sitting in a wheat field a lovely picture, fresh as the dew of morning, in which
Gainsborough’s two major interests seem almost equally balanced; and at the close of his career his
love of scenery sometimes prevailed over his interest in human beings, and resulted not so much in
a portrait as in a picture of a garden or a park, animated by gallant men and gracious women. The
tendency to prefer the scenery to the persons animating it reaches a climax in the famous canvas
Ladies Walking in the Mall. It is a view of the central avenue of the Mall, near Gainsborough’s
residence, behind Carlton House. The identity of the fashionable ladies taking an afternoon stroll in
the park is happily ignored. The rustling of the foliage is echoed, as it were, in the shimmer of the
ladies’ gowns, so that Horace Walpole wrote of the picture that it was “all-a-flutter, like a lady’s
fan”. It has the delicate grace of Lancret or Pater, and betrays the painter’s ingenious escape from
his studio to the greenest retreat.
(From Painter and Poet by Chauncey Tinker)
3.4. The Most Versatile English Painter. Some of his early portraits show the sitters
grouped in a landscape (Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, с 1750). As he became famous and his sitters
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fashionable, he adopted a more formal manner that owed something to Anthony Van Dyck (The
Blue Boy, с 1770). His landscapes are of idyllic scenes. During his last years he also painted
seascapes and idealized full-size pictures of rustics and country children.
Gainsborough was the youngest son of John Gainsborough, a maker of woolen goods. When
he was 13, he persuaded his father to send him to London to study on the strength of his promise at
landscape. He worked as an assistant to Hubert Gravelot, a French painter and engraver and an
important figure in London art circles at the time. From him Gainsborough learned something of the
French Rococo idiom, which had a considerable influence on the development of his style. In 1746
in London he married Margaret Burr, the illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Beaufort. Soon
afterward he returned, to Suffolk and settled in Ipswich in 1752; his daughters Mary and Margaret
were born in 1748 and 1752, respectively. In Ipswich Gainsborough met his first biographer, Philip
Thicknesse. He early acquired some reputation as a portrait and landscape painter and made an
adequate living.
Gainsborough declared that his first love was landscape and began to learn the language of
this art from the Dutch XVII century landscapists, who by 1740 were becoming popular with
English collectors; his first landscapes were influenced by Jan Wynants. The earliest dated picture
with a landscape background is a study of a bull terrier Bumper – A Bull Terrier (1745; Sir Edward
Bacon Collection, Raveningham, Norfolk), in which many of the details are taken straight from
Wynants. But by 1748, when he painted Cornard Wood, Jacob van Ruisdael had become the
predominant influence; although it is full of naturalistic detail. Gainsborough probably never
painted directly from nature. The Charterhouse, one of this few topographical views, dates from the
same year as Cornard Wood and in the subtle effect of light on various surfaces proclaims Dutch
influence. In the background to Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, he anticipates the realism of the great
English landscapist of the next century, John Constable, but for the most part fancy held sway. In
many of the early landscapes the influence of Rococo design learned from Gravelot is evident,
together with a feeling for the French pastoral tradition. The Woodcutter Courting a Milkmaid is an
Anglicized version of a French theme, which recalls compositions by Jean-Honore Fragonard.
Although Gainsborough preferred landscape, he knew he must paint portraits for economic reasons.
The small heads painted in Suffolk, although sometimes rather stiff, are penetrating character
studies delicately and freely pencilled, particularly the jaunty self-portrait in a cocked hat at
Houghton. Gainsborough painted few full-length portraits in Suffolk. Mr. William Woollaston,
although an ambitious composition, is intimate and informal. The Painter’s Daughters Chasing a
Butterfly, composed in the last years at Ipswich, is, in its easy naturalism and sympathetic
understanding, one of the best English portraits of children.
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3.5. As well as straight portraits, he painted in Suffolk a number of delightful spontaneous
groups of small figures closely related to conversation pieces. Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, which has
been described as the most English of English pictures, is set in a typical Suffolk landscape. Lady
and Gentleman in Landscape is more Frenchified, with its vivacious Rococo rhythms, but Heneage
Lloyd and His Sister is more stylized, the charming little figures being posed against a conventional
background of steps and decorative urns.
To obtain a wider public, Gainsborough moved in 1759 to Bath, where his studio was soon
thronged with fashionable sitters. He moved in musical and theatrical circles, and among his friends
were members of the Linley family, whose portraits he painted. At Bath he also met the actor David
Garrick, for whom he had a profound admiration and whom he painted on many occasions. His
passion for music and the stage continued throughout his life. In the west country he visited many
of the great houses and at Wilton fell under the spell of Anthony Van Dyck, the predominating
influence in his later work. In spite of the demand for portraits, he continued to paint landscapes.
In 1761 he sent a portrait of Earl Nugent to the Society of Artists, and in the following year
the first notice of his work appeared in the London press. Throughout the 1760s he exhibited
regularly in London and in 1768 was elected a foundation member of the Royal Academy.
Characteristically he never took much part in the deliberations.
After he moved to Bath, Gainsborough had less time for landscape and worked a good deal
from memory, often drawing by candlelight from little model landscapes set up in his studio. About
1760 Peter Paul Rubens supplanted the Dutch painters as Gainsborough’s chief love. This is
particularly noticeable in Peasants Returning from Market, with its rich colour and beautiful creamy
pastel shades. The influence of Rubens is also apparent in The Harvest Wagon in the fluency of the
drawing and the scale of the great beech trees so different from the stubby oaks of Suffolk. The idyllic
scene is a perfect blend of the real and the ideal. The group in the cart is based on Rubens’ Descent
from the Cross (1611–14) in Antwerp cathedral, which Gainsborough copied.
In Bath, Gainsborough had to satisfy a more sophisticated clientele and adopted a more
formal and elegant portrait style based largely on a study of Van Dyck at Wilton, where he made a
free copy of Van Dyck’s painting of the Pembroke family. By 1769, when he painted Isabella
Countess of Sefton, it is easy to see the refining influence of Van Dyck in the dignified simplicity of
the design and the subtle muted colouring. One of Gainsborough’s most famous pictures, The Blue
Boy, was probably painted in 1770. In painting this subject in Van Dyck dress, he was following an
XVIII century fashion in painting, as well as doing homage to his hero. The influence of Van Dyck
is most clearly seen in the more official portraits. John, 4th Duke of Argyll in his splendid robes is
composed in the grand manner, and Augustus John, Third Earl of Bristol rivals Reynolds’ portraits
of the kind. Gainsborough preferred to paint his friends rather than public figures, and a group of
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portraits of the 1760s – Uvedale Price, Sir William St. Quinton, and Thomas Coward, all oldish men
of strong character – illustrate Gainsborough’s sense of humour and his individual approach to
sympathetic sitters.
3.6. In 1774 he moved to London and settled in part of Schomberg House in Pall Mall. Fairly
soon he began to be noticed by the royal family and partly because of his informality and Tory
politics was preferred by George III above the official court painter, Sir Joshua Reynolds. In 1781
he was commissioned to paint the King and the Queen.
Gainsborough continued his landscape work. The Watering Place was described by
Horace Walpole, the English man of letters, as in the style of Rubens, but it also has much of the
classic calm of Claude Lorrain, whose etchings Gainsborough owned. In 1783 he made an
expedition to the Lake District to see for himself the “wild” scenery extolled by the devotees of the
picturesque. On his return he painted a number of mountain scenes that have analogies with the work
of Gaspard Dughet, whose works were widely distributed in English country houses. Some sea
pieces dating from the 1780s show a new kind of realism, harking back to the Dutch seascape
tradition. During his last years Gainsborough was haunted by his nostalgia for Arcadia in the
English countryside and painted a series of pictures of peasant life more ideal than real, for
example, The Cottage Door. But one of the latest landscapes, The Market Cart, is less idealized
and more true to nature and looks forward to Constable in its treatment of the light breaking
through the massive foliage.
Gainsborough was the only important English portrait painter to devote much time to
landscape drawing. He composed a great many drawings in a variety of mediums including chalk,
pen and wash, and watercolour, some of them varnished. He was always eager to find new papers
and new techniques. He produced a magic lantern to give striking lighting effects; the box is still in
the Victoria and Albert Museum, together with some of the slides. In addition Gainsborough made a
series of soft ground etchings and aquatints. He never sold his drawings and, although many of
them are closely related to pictures, they are not studies in the ordinary sense but works of art in
their own right.
Queen Charlotte is more restrained; the painting of the flounced white dress decorated with
ribbons and laces makes her look every inch a queen. It is significant that Gainsborough, unlike
most of his contemporaries, did not generally use drapery painters. In 1784 he quarreled with the
Academy because they insisted on hanging the Three Eldest Princesses at the normal height from
the floor, which Gainsborough maintained was too high to appreciate his lightness of touch and
delicate penciling. In protest he withdrew the pictures he had intended for the exhibition and never
showed again at the Academy.
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