Добавил:
ivanov666
Опубликованный материал нарушает ваши авторские права? Сообщите нам.
Вуз:
Предмет:
Файл:Практикум по культуре речевого общения искусство. Часть 1. Практикум
.pdf
51
In some of Gainsborough’s later portraits of women, he dispensed with precise finish, and,
without sacrificing the likeness, he concentrated on the general effect. Mrs. Sheridan melts into the
landscape, while Lady Bate Dudley, a symphony in blue and green, is an insubstantial form, almost
an abstract. Mrs. Siddons, on the other hand, shows that Gainsborough could still paint a splendid
objective study. Few of the later male portraits are of a pronounced character, but exceptions are two
particularly good pictures of musicians, Johann Christian Fischer and the unfinished Lord
Abingdon (private collection).
A new venture in 1783 was The Mall in St. James’ Park, a park scene described by Horace
Walpole as “all a flutter like a lady’s fan”. The Morning Walk, with romanticized figures strolling in a
landscape, is painted in the same spirit. The “fancy pictures” painted in the 1780s gave Gainsborough
particular pleasure. They are full-sized, idealized portraits of country children and peasants painted
from models – for example, The Cottage Girl with a Bowl of Milk. The idea appeared in immature
form in the little rustic Suffolk figures, and he may have been fired to exploit it further by seeing the
XVII century Spanish painter Bartolomeu Murillo’s St. John, which he copied.
He died in 1788 and was buried in Kew churchyard.
3.7. Mrs. R.B. Sheridan. 1783. The National Gallery of Art, Washington. The subject of
this portrait was one of the most fascinating women in eighteenth-century England. Born in a
provincial town, Miss Elisabeth Linley at the age of nineteen captivated the musical world of
London with her singing. “The whole town,” wrote a contemporary’, “seems distracted about her.
Every other diversion is forsaken. Miss Linley alone engrosses all eyes, ears, hearts... and to her
voice was added the most beautiful person, expressive of the soul within.” The same year
fashionable London was rocked with the news that Miss Linley had eloped to France with Richard
Sheridan, the famous statesman and dramatist. In the portrait note the apparently careless free,
flowing brush strokes, particularly in the dress and background. Gainsborough is known to have
painted on occasion with brushes mounted on handles almost six feet long, in order to be the same
distance from his model and his canvas and this may account for the rough, sketchy technique. The
fact that Gainsborough also often painted by candlelight may be a further explanation of the
shimmering, wispy effect. Reynolds, commenting on this feature of Gainsborough’s art wrote:
“This chaos, this uncouth and shapeless appearance, by a kind of magic, at a certain distance
consumes form, and all the parts seem to drop into their proper places; so that we can hardly refuse
acknowledging the full effect of diligence, under the appearance of chance.”
(From British Painting in the National Gallery of Art by H.W. Cooke)
Gainsborough’s portrait of Mrs. Sheridan is set in an imaginary landscape which reminds us
that it was the age of English landscape gardening, when great estates were artificially contoured
and picturesque groves of trees planted in an effort to “improve” on nature. The trees are lightly
52
windswept and the lady herself is naturally, and charmingly, windswept too, the breeze bringing a
fresh flush to her pale complexion – it is easy to see how freely Gainsborough wielded his brush,
with light, impressionistic strokes building up thin, translucent layers of paint. The effect is pastoral,
poetic and uniquely English.
(From 100 Masterpieces in Colour by Christopher Wood)
3.8. Mr. and Mrs. Andrews. 1748–1749. The National Gallery, London. Mrs. Andrews is
seated stiffly on an elegant garden seat; but what she holds on her lap we are left to imagine, for in
that area Gainsborough has left the portrait unfinished. Her husband stands beside her, leaning with
his elbow on the back of her seat, and with one leg crossed casually in front of the other. Under his
arm he carries a gun.
Gainsborough has painted Mr. and Mrs. Andrews on their farm Auberies near Sudbury, and
perhaps uniquely in his oeuvre he has painted an identifiable view. The site may still be located, and
the ground still falls away behind the oak tree, just as Gainsborough has painted it. Planting now
obscures the view of Lavenham church tower to the left, and the tower and spire of St. Peter’s
Church in the centre is equally obscured. Nevertheless the view is «real»; but it is only upon closer
scrutiny that the extent of its reality becomes apparent, and the full significance of the picture can
be appreciated.
The enthusiasm for gardening which had been established in England in the late years of the
XVII century assumed the proportions of a passion by the early years of the eighteenth; and it was
but a short step for this passion for gardening to become the mania for Agriculture that was one of
the phenomena of a century when the King (George III) contributed to the Agricultural literature
and was commonly referred to as Farmer George. From about 1720 publications of Agriculture
abounded.
It is against this background that Gainsborough’s portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Andrews should
be viewed. In a Spectator essay of 1712, Joseph Addison had written: “... fields of corn make a
pleasant prospect, and if the walks were a little taken care of ... a man might make a pretty
landscape of his own possessions.” Mr. Andrews has indeed made “a pretty landscape of his own
possessions” and no wonder that he should invite Gainsborough to paint them as background to his
portrait. He is a farmer who fans land enclosed “with hedges in straight lines according to some
Plan” and his sheep graze contentedly in a field unlike those which range the Common “poor
battered and poisoned with the Rot”. The gates to his fields are correctly made and painted; and his
cattle to the left, far from being a “starved, scabby, and Rascally race” are sheltered by newly-built
sheds. His corn, shown in rows or drills is well harvested, and the sheaves are neatly stacked in a
model fashion. He carries a gun, for by the XVIII century Game Laws, only a person qualified by
estate or social standing might shoot game. Only one element of the portrait seems fanciful, and this
is the exquisite seat on which Mrs. Andrews is seated.
53
Earlier than Gainsborough’s portrait, garden seats had been depicted in many English
Conversation Pieces; but they were generally of a sturdy nature, clearly wooden, and requiring little
or no specialist skills on the part of the estate carpenters who probably made them. The Andrews’s
seat, however, is something entirely different. It must almost certainly be of wood, for cast iron
furniture only came into vogue some twenty years later, and yet would it be really possible for any
joiner however talented, to create in wood the graceful rococo swirls which support so ably the
fragile Mrs. Andrews? Gravelot at the time of Gainsborough’s apprenticeship to him was employed
in designing the decorative surrounds for the portraits, and Gainsborough probably assisted him.
The interlaced legs of the seat and the scallop shell that forms the centrepiece of the back find their
parallel in Gravelot’s design.
(From Reynolds and Gainsborough by Homan Patterson)
3.9. Fair Faces of England. Gainsborough’s portraits are a gallery of an extraordinary
group of people. He captured on his canvases not only the look but the very spirit of Britain’s
aristocrats, soldiers, squires, statesmen, and assorted folk of leisure and means. They lived with
style in both city and countryside. They relished the theatre, politics and gossip. They were supreme
optimists, the leading citizens of the most vigorous nation in the world.
And, if they were also a bit smug, at least they tolerated among themselves a delightful
assortment of eccentricities. With his portraits, Gainsborough immortalized the fascinating face of
XVIII century England.
(From The World of Gainsborough by S.N. Leonard)
4. Joshua Reynolds
4.1. In Reynolds’ day society portraiture had become a monotonous repetition of the same
theme, with only the most limited of variations permissible. According to the formula, the sitter was
to be posed centrally, with the background (curtain, pillar, chair perhaps a hint of landscape)
disposed like a backdrop behind; normally the head was done by the master, the body by a pupil or
“drapery assistant”, who might serve several painters. Pose and expression, even the features
themselves, tended to be regulated to a standard of polite and inexpressive elegance; the portraits
told little about their subjects other than that they were that sort of people who had their portraits
painted – they certainly gave nothing away beyond the summary description of the features. They
were effigies; life had departed.
It was Reynolds who insisted in his practice that a portrait could and should be also a full,
complex work of art on many levels; he conceived his portraits in terms of history painting. Each
fresh sitter was not just a physical fact to be recorded, but rather a story to be told (or sometimes,
one suspects, a myth to be created). His people are no longer static, but caught between this
54
movement and the next, between one moment and the next. Their minds and bodies exist on the
brink of various possibilities, and they are essentially involved in the weather of life.
Reynolds was indeed a consummate producer of character (whether they bore much
resemblance to the originals, the raw stuff from which they were created, is another, academic
matter; in point of fact, the catching of a convincing likeness was not his forte), and his production
methods reward investigation. For them he called upon the full repertoire of the Old Masters; in
Italy, as a young man, he had studied the Old Masters of all schools, not so that he could ape their
individual works, but in order to win a similar mastery of the effect which they knew how to
achieve: to rival them in their own language but not to pastiche them. In the building up of the
picture in light and shade, his hand ling of composition, he also paid homage to Rembrandt.
Reynolds painted portraits, group pictures and historical themes. His sitters included the
socially prominent people of the time and when the Royal Academy was founded in 1768, he
naturally became its first president.
Among his best works are those in which he departs from the traditional forms of
ceremonial portraiture and abandons himself to inspiration, as in The Portrait of Nelly O’Brien,
which is aglow with light, warmth and feeling.
4.2. To feel to the full the contrast between Reynolds and Hogarth, there is no better way
than to look at their self-portraits. Hogarth’s of 1745 in the Tate Gallery, Reynolds’s of 1773 in the
Royal Academy. Hogarth had a round face, with sensuous lips, and in his pictures looks you
straight in the face. He is accompanied by a pug-dog licking his lip and looking very much like his
master. The dog sits in front of the painted oval frame in which the portrait appears – that is the
Baroque trick of a picture within a picture. Reynolds scorns such tricks. His official self-portrait
shows him in an elegant pose with his glove in his hand, the body fitting nicely into the noble
triangular outline which Raphael and Titian had favoured, and behind him on the right appears a
bust of Michelangelo.
This portrait is clearly as programmatic as Hogarth’s. Reynolds’s programme is known to us
in the greatest detail. He gave altogether fifteen discourses to the students of the Academy – and
they were all printed. And whereas Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty was admired by few and neglected
by most – Reynolds’s Discourses were international reading.
What did Reynolds plead for? His is on the whole a consistent theory. “Study the great
masters... who have stood the test of ages,” and especially “study the works of the ancient
sculptors”. Copy “those choice parts” from them “which have recommended the work to notice”;
for “it is by being conversant with the invention of others that we learn to invent”. Don’t be “a mere
copier of nature”, don’t “amuse mankind with the minute neatness of your imitations, endeavour to
impress them by the grandeur of [...] ideas”. Don’t strive for “dazzling elegancies” of brushwork
55
either, form is superior to colour, as idea is to ornament. The history painter is the painter of the
highest order; for a subject ought to be “generally interesting”. It is his right and duty to “deviate
from vulgar and strict historical truth”. So Reynolds would not have been tempted by the reporter’s
attitude to the painting of important contemporary events. With such views on vulgar truth and
general ideas, the portrait painter is ipso facto inferior to the history painter. Genre, and landscape
and still life rank even lower. The student ought to keep his “principal attention fixed upon the
higher excellencies. If you compass them, and compass nothing more, you are still first class... You
may be very imperfect, but still you are an imperfect artist of the highest order”.
This is clearly a consistent, theory, and it is that of the Italian and even more of the French
XVII century. There is nothing specifically English in it. But what is eminently English about
Reynolds and his Discourses is the contrast between what he preached and what he did. History
painting and the Grand Manner, he told the students, is what they ought to aim at, but he was a
portrait painter most exclusively, and an extremely successful one.
(From The Englishness of English Art by Nikolaus Pevsner)
4.3. Joshua Reynolds, one of the outstanding British portraitists and an important influence
on his contemporaries. Born in Devon, the son of a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, at seventeen
Reynolds was apprenticed to the portrait painter Thomas Hudson. By the age of twenty he had set
himself up as a portraitist among the local gentry in Devon and the naval officers at Plymouth.
Taken to the Mediterranean on a ship commanded by a friend, he reached Rome in 1749 and stayed
there three years. While studying, he eked out his finances by occasional copying of Old Masters,
doing portraits of English visitors and the caricature portrait groups then in style. He returned to
London via Paris and within a short time had achieved a considerable success. In 1755, for
example, he did 120 portraits. Reynolds bought a large house with studios and exhibition gallery as
well as facilities for his many students and assistants. He lived in high style and collected Old
Master paintings as part of the role of being successful and fashionable, and also because his
viewpoint as an artist made such collecting inevitable. Although his prices increased constantly,
commissions kept pace: portraits, group pictures and historical themes. His sitters included the
socially prominent people of the time and when the Royal Academy was founded in 1768, he
naturally became its first president; he was also knighted. This success was the product of his
exceptionally strong will and determination to succeed. An urbane and discreet opportunist, he
moved in the highest aristocratic circles as well as an exclusive literary and theatrical group that
included Goldsmith, Dr. Johnson, Richard Brinsley Sheridan and other celebrities. In 1784 he
became principal painter to the king and employed various assistants to do the many royal portraits
expected of him. At the same time he acted as agent and dealer for noblemen interested in collecting
Old Masters.
56
Reynolds’ point of view as a painter was just as “safe” as his social outlook; he believed that
by analysis of Old Masters he could build a composite style of great art. He made careful studies of
Rembrandt, Titian, Correggio and various French painters in the furtherance of this aim, but these
eclectic procedures do not represent his best work. He did have a personal creative power and
variety of pictorial invention when he chose to let himself go and to forget that he was a great man.
We find many paintings with a life and a grandeur beyond the many borrowed elements. His
portraits – the honest ones – are effective because their expression is related to the type of sitter, e.g.
Dr. Johnson, Admiral Keppel and many others. His colours are difficult to judge today because they
were not scientifically applied, so that many paintings have cracked and faded, but the form design
and pictorial rhythm are often quite impressive. Many of his portraits are originally composed in
decorative pattern and organized in light and space arrangements. Although such works are
distinguished by graceful and controlled movement as well as dignity, he is far less successful in his
privately painted coy nudes, sentimentalized children, and such trite and inanely erotic pictures as
The Snake in the Grass or Love Unbinding the Zone of Beauty. Yet Reynolds was a great force in
his time and contemporaries borrowed freely the various elements of his art, particularly his selfassured manner.
For twenty years he was the most prominent artist of his day, even in the face of the rising
Gainsborough.
(From The Encyclopaedia of Painting by B.S. Myers, M.W. Brown, G.R. Collins, B.
Farwell, J.G. Mahler, M. Salinger)
4.4. Reynolds’s Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse: the Grand Manner Taken Seriously.
For anyone coming to the painting with a fresh eye the first impression must surely be one of
dignity and solemnity. It is an impression created not only by the pose and bearing of the central
figure herself, and her costume, but also by the attitude of her two shadowy attendants, by the
arrangement of the figures, and by the colour. The colour must appear as one of the most
remarkable features of the painting. To the casual glance the picture seems monochromatic. The
dominant tone is a rich golden brown, interrupted only by the creamy areas of the face and arms and
by the deep velvety shadows of the background. On closer examination a much greater variety in
the colour is apparent, but the first impression remains valid for the painting as a unit.
The central figure sits on a throne like chair. She does not look at the spectator but appears
in deep contemplation; her expression is one of melancholy musing. Her gestures aptly reinforce the
meditative air of the head and also contribute to the regal quality of the whole figure. A great
pendent cluster of pearls adorns the front of her dress. In the heavy, sweeping draperies that envelop
the figure there are no frivolous elements of feminine costume to conflict with the initial effect of
solemn grandeur.
57
In the background, dimly seen on either side of the throne, are two attendant figures. One,
with lowered head and melancholy expression, holds a bloody dagger; the other, his features
contorted into an expression of horror, grasps a cup. Surely these figures speak of violent events.
Their presence adds a sinister impression to a picture already heavily charged with grave qualities.
At the time the portrait was painted, Sarah Siddons was in her late twenties, but she already
had a solid decade of acting experience behind her. She was born in 1755, the daughter of Roger
Kemble, manager of an itinerant company of actors. Most of her early acting experience was with
her father’s company touring through English provincial centres. Her reputation rose so quickly that
in 1775, when she was only twenty, she was engaged by Garrick to perform at Drury Lane. But this
early London adventure proved premature; she was unsuccessful and retired again to the provincial
circuits, acting principally at Bath. She threw her full energies into building her repertory and
perfecting her acting technique, with the result that her return to London as a tragic actress in the
autumn of 1782, was one of the great sensations of theatre history. Almost overnight she found
herself the unquestioned first lady of the British stage, a position she retained for thirty years. The
leading intellectuals and statesmen of the day were among her most fervent admirers and were in
constant attendance at her performance. Among the intelligentsia who flocked to see the great
actress and returned again and again was Sir Joshua Reynolds, the august president of the Royal
Academy. He was at the time the most respected painter in England, and he also enjoyed a wide
reputation as a theorist on art.
Reynolds moved with ease among the great men of his day. Mrs. Siddons remarks in her
memoirs: “...At his house were assembled all the good, the wise, the talented, the rank and fashion
of the age.” The painting is in fact a brilliantly successful synthesis of images and ideas from a wide
variety of sources. The basic notion of representing Mrs. Siddons in the guise of the Tragic Muse
may well have been suggested to Reynolds by a poem honouring the actress and published early in
1783. The verses themselves are not distinguished, but the title and the poet’s initial image of Mrs.
Siddons enthroned as Melpomene, the muse of tragedy, may have lodged in Reynolds’s memory
and given the initial direction to his thinking about the portrait. It has long been recognized that in
the basic organization of the picture Reynolds had Michelangelo’s prophets and sybils of the Sistine
ceiling in mind. Mrs. Siddons’s pose recalls that of Isaiah, and of the two attendant figures the one
on the left is very closely modelled on the similarly placed companion of the prophet Jeremiah.
Reynolds’s attitude toward this sort of borrowing from the works of other artists may seem a little
strange to us today. He thought that great works of art should serve as a school to the students at the
Royal Academy: “He, who borrows an idea from an ancient, or even from a modern artist not his
contemporary, and so accommodates his own work, that it makes a part of it, with no seam or
joining appearing, can hardly be charged with plagiarism: poets practice this kind of borrowing,
58
without reserve. But an artist should not be content with this only; he should enter into a
competition with his original, and endeavour to improve what he is appropriating to his own work.
Such imitation is ... a perpetual exercise of the mind, a continual invention.” From this point of view
The Tragic Muse is a perfect illustration of Reynolds’s advice to the student.
If the arrangement of the figures in the portrait of Mrs. Siddons suggests Michelangelo,
other aspects of the painting, particularly the colour, the heavy shadow effects, and the actual
application of the paint, are totally unlike the work of Michelangelo and suggest instead the
paintings of Rembrandt.
But the amazing thing is that the finished product is in no sense a pastiche. The disparate
elements have all been transformed through Reynolds’s own visual imagination and have emerged
as a unit in which the relationship of all the parts to one another seems not only correct but
inevitable. This in itself is an achievement commanding our admiration.
In The Tragic Muse Reynolds achieved an air of grandeur and dignity which he and his
contemporaries regarded as a prime objective of art and which no other portrait of the day embodied
so successfully.
(From Ten British Pictures 1740–1840 by Robert Wark)
4.5. Three Ladies Adorning the Term of Hymen. 1774. The National Gallery, London.
The painting shows three daughters of the Scottish jurist and Member of Parliament Sir Williams
Montgomery about to drape a garland of flowers on a bust of Hymen, the Greek God of marriage
that stands on a tapered column known architecturally as a “term”.
The girls were famous both as beauties and as amateur actresses and the fiancé of one of
them, Luke Gardiner, had written to Sir Joshua in courtly prose: “This letter will be delivered to you
by Miss Montgomery, who intends to sit to you with her two sisters, to compose a picture, of which
I am to have the honour of being possessor. I wish to have their portraits together in full length,
representing some emblematic or historical subject; the idea of which, and the attitudes which will
best suit their forms, cannot be so well imagined, as by one who has so eminently distinguished
himself by his genius and poetic intention.”
To Reynolds this was a golden opportunity: three beautiful, famous and highborn models
ready to pose for a picture conforming exactly to his concept of the grand manner. The theme he
selected, had its origin in the Greece of ancient times, when women wanting children offered
sacrifices to Priapus, the erotic god of fertility. Later ages discard Priapus in favour of Hymen, the
god of lawful wedlock. Many of masters had used variations of the theme, among them Nicolas
Poussin, who painted, a riot of lightly clad nymphs dancing a wild bacchanal before the god, and
later Paul Rubens who made his true worshippers as voluptuously nude as only he could.
59
Reynolds, of course, had no such indecorous plan; he was dealing with the respectable
daughters of a Scottish Member of Parliament. After examining the precedents like a lawyer tracing
a land title, he finally posed the girls in a balanced pattern that was a composite of many earlier
pictures and in accordance with his own principles. There is even a bit of symbolism decipherable
only by the girls’ families or intimate friends. Since two of them were married by the time they
posed for Reynolds, he painted them actually draping the garland on Hymen, the still unmarried
sister is shown gathering flowers to win the god’s favour.
There is something wonderful about this picture and also something ridiculous. All its
details including an incongruous Oriental rug on which one of the girls is kneeling, confirm Sir
Joshua’s great skill with the brush. Yet he was trying to do the impossible: to paint a picture of a
classical theme in the grand manner and still conform to the convention of his own time. Though
the girls represent the Three Graces, whom Greek and Renaissance artists customarily portrayed
with no clothes at all, they are wearing voluminous pseudoclassical robes that reveal only blunted
outlines of their bodies. They are posed in a tableau with no suggestion of movement and although
their faces have some of the “ideal” beauty of Greek statues, they are utterly serious and proper,
with none of the gay sensuality that earlier painters gave to the devotees of Hymen.
Nevertheless, the picture was a great success in its time, and Reynolds himself was very
much pleased with it. To Luke Gardiner he wrote: “The subject affords sufficient employment to
the figures and gives an opportunity of introducing a variety of graceful historical attitudes.”
(From The World of Gainsborough by Jonathan Norton Leonard)
4.6. Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792) and Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788). Both
painters had a manner that must have been pleasing to their models, but they differed greatly in their
approach. In a memorable analysis of their portraits, Edgar Wind not only pinpointed these
differences but connected them with two basic attitudes of human behaviour formulated by David
Hume on the one hand and by Samuel Johnson, James Beattie, and Edmund Burke on the other.
The basic conflict was alluded to in Reynolds’ eulogy of Gainsborough after his rival’s
death. Ending years of mutual coldness, if not hostility, they had recently made peace, since each
could not help recognizing the other’s genius; Reynolds, conscious of his responsibilities as president
of the Royal Academy, felt obliged to temper his praise of Gainsborough with a warning to his
students. Gainsborough, he said, had seen the world “with the eye of the painter, not the poet”.
This was a clear allusion to Horace’s dictum that painting should follow poetry. Reynolds was
deeply convinced that art was only worthy of the name if it poetically transfigured reality. In his
own portraits he followed the “grand manner” of the French academicians, heightening the effect
through the addition of fitting formal or iconographic elements. Military heroes were rendered in
dramatic light and heroic poses; actors were shown in favourite roles; and ladies were disguised as
60
goddesses, saints, or vestal virgins if their social activity did not make a Thais or a Danae appropriate.
He also paid his respects to tradition by “quoting”, more or less literally, from the ancients or the
masters of the Renaissance. Thus one lady holding a child might strike the pose of a Raphael
Madonna, while another might evoke Salviati’s Allegory of Chastity, Mrs. Siddons, famous as a
dramatic actress, was modelled after Michelangelo’s prophets on the Sistine Ceiling when Reynolds
painted her as the Tragic Muse, enthroned between Pity and Terror. All this was alien to
Gainsborough’s temperament and conception of art. Living in London only reluctantly, averse to all
intellectual ambitions and pretensions, happiest when outdoors in nature or making music with
friends, Gainsborough aimed at an art that could be described as “natural” in the sense in which
Hume used the word. Just as to Hume the “natural” attitude of man was that which avoids both
excessive pride and humility, so Gainsborough’s models never pose as anything other than what
they are – or what he felt they should be. For just as the Caroline society was probably quite unlike
what Van Dyck made of it, so the ladies and gentlemen posing for Gainsborough were hardly the
uniformly well-mannered, impassive, and slightly withdrawn beings in Gainsborough’s canvases.
Like Van Dyck, whom he worshipped, Gainsborough stressed slender proportions, elegant
costumes, and a charming negligence of pose. Despite these similarities, Gainsborough’s figures
can never be mistaken for anything but members of the fashionable society of XVIII century
England. It is probably fair to say that Gainsborough’s interpretation contributed more to shaping
the historic image of that society than Reynolds’ flashier portraits. And just as Watteau may have
influenced the social behaviour of XVIII century Frenchmen, Gainsborough’s figures may have
made an important contribution to the overt manners of English aristocracy; if nothing else, they shaped its
popular image.
Thus, when Gainsborough painted Mrs. Siddons, he made no reference to her profession.
Immaculately groomed and dressed with dazzling chic, she sits quietly on a chair, patiently posing
for a painter who seems to have been enamoured of the play of light on her striped dress, the soft
undulations of her powdered hair, the extravagant silhouette of her plumed hat, but who did not give
a farthing that his model was a celebrated actress. Gainsborough’s portrait of his friend Dr.
Schomberg nowhere hints that this gentleman briefly stopping on a stroll in the country is a
physician; and whereas Reynolds appears in his self-portraits either as the professional painter –
once even borrowing an outfit like Rembrandt’s – or as the president of the Royal Academy,
Gainsborough’s self-portraits are in no way different from his other works.
Gainsborough’s increasing success as a fashionable portraitist was bought at a price, as may
be seen in the contrast between his portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Andrews of about 1749 and the picture
known as the Morning Walk of 1785. Obviously the late work is the result of skillful planning; the
young couple walks in unison, and even the dog is in step. The execution has the shimmering
Соседние файлы в предмете [НЕСОРТИРОВАННОЕ]