Text d. Thomas Gainsborough

The art of Thomas Gainsborough (1727-88) is in striking contrast with that of either Hogarth or Reynolds. These two were essentially townsmen; by affection as well as birth Gainsborough was a countryman. His art was aristocratic, that is to say it tended towards an ideal, in which respect it clearly differed from the realistic outlook of Hogarth the 'man of the people'. Hogarth's view of life was bounded by London and though the 'Election' series has its admirable landscape backgrounds they are incidental to the human action, whereas Gainsborough found his greatest satisfaction in landscape composition in which the figures were, in his own words, 'such as fill a place (I won't say stop a Gap) or to create a little business for the Eye to be drawn from the Trees in order to return to them with more glee'.

To say that his tendency was towards an ideal might seem to place him in close accord with Reynolds, yet a wide difference at once appears between the consciously formed intellectual attitude of Reynolds, with its reference to the greatness of Italy, and the free and instinctive fashion in which Gainsborough sought to 'deliver' as he said 'a fine sentiment'. It is significant that Reynolds spent some years in Italy and Gainsborough was never tempted to leave his native land. Under the pressure of contemporary patronage he was 'chiefly in the Face way', though in spite of his success as a portrait painter he has left no such gallery of the illustrious, observed with intense psychological interest, as Reynolds provides. He excels with the type rather than the individual and most of all in visions of beauty and grace. In his painting portraiture, landscape, and the art of imaginative composition are uniquely found together. In the sense that his work presents an analogy with poetry and music which is absent from that of Hogarth and Reynolds he has the advantage of both.

In its formation Gainsborough's art seems to stem from various sources. The period spent in his teens in London with the French engraver Hubert Gravelot (before the latter left for Paris in 1745) must have given him a feeling for the delicacy of the French pastoral, though Hayman, who comes within the same ambience and whom the young Gainsborough certainly knew, provides a direct antecedent for the open-air conversation piece in which Gainsborough's mastery was beautifully shown in his Suffolk period at Sudbury and Ipswich. The pose of John Plampin of Chadacre reclining by a tree, with one of those dogs Gainsborough always painted so well, is very similar to that of Hayman's Garrick and Wyndham. How far the genius of Gainsborough transcended such models is, however, shown by the superb Mr and Mrs Robert Andrews, so sentient in every respect of English country and English life.

The taste of the time for Dutch pictures and the affinity between Holland and East Anglia give an indication of his starting-point in landscape. He had some experience in copying and restoring paintings by Ruisdael and others. How well he adapted and transformed the Dutch method of composition is shown in the magnificent Cornard Wood. A freshness in which there is both a feeling for country life and a sense of the charm of immaturity is revealed in the paintings of his small daughters, probably executed at Ipswich before he set out for Bath and the second phase of his career.

During his fourteen years at Bath (1759-74) his success as a fashionable portrait painter gave his work a new direction. He was now influenced by Van Dyck whose paintings he was able to appreciate at Wilton and in other great houses. As a result his portraits took on a new elegance and subtlety of technique. From the 1760s onwards it appears in many masterpieces and his style reaches its perfection in his last period, in London from 1744 to 1788, The Morning Walk being a superb example.

In the landscape for which in these city years Gainsborough constantly expressed a nostalgic preference he makes a like departure. It is sometimes lamented that an authentic Suffolk no longer appears in his work, though the assumption that landscape was simply an atrophied memory may well be discounted. He was evidently more concerned than before with general principles of massing and lighting as in the magnificent Market Cart, c. 1786-7 (Tate Gallery). It was in harmony with this generalizing tendency that the human figures became Arcadian peasants rather than local rustics. His habit of making miniature landscapes in the studio out of odd scraps of vegetable and mineral matter and his delight in the dramatic entertainment called the 'Eidophusikon' which caused him to invent his own peepshow box, in which transparencies lit by the flicker of candles gave a rich variety of effect, are aspects of his experimental interest in both form and light and shade.

Technically, Gainsborough was most original both in portraits and landscape. Those 'odd scratches and marks . . . this chaos which by a kind of magic at a certain distance assumes form', on which Reynolds commented with a mixture of disapproval and admiration, was a brilliant way of animating a surface. He seems very 'modern' in his drawings and the combination of different media which makes many of them a species of free painting. Opaque and transparent colour are sometimes found together; sometimes he lays a transparent wash over a chalk ground, working further over the surface with touches of chalk or body colour or using chalk, pen, and brush over an opaque foundation, frequently varnishing the drawing to add something of the richness of oil, dabbing in broad touches (his 'moppings') with a sponge tied to the end of a stick and as a result producing extraordinary impressions of light and substance. Gainsborough's love of experiment and his entirely personal quest of the ideal took various directions, especially marked in his later years. It is to be noted that his affection for his native Suffolk and its lowland country did not prevent him from seeking the 'sublime' in the Lake District in the 1780s. The 'fancy pictures' as he termed the imaginative compositions of his final period, though few of them are left, include such an original production as the Diana and Actaeon of the Royal Collection. Although he remarked, with humorous envy, on Reynolds's variety, he was in fact much the more varied of the two. Reynolds remarked that Gainsborough 'did not look at Nature with a poet's eye', by which he meant, perhaps, in a literary fashion. On the contrary, if one defines the poetry of a painter as an imaginative view of his world, investing it with rhythmic grace, Gainsborough was the most poetic artist of this great age.