Thomas Gainsborough

British, 1727 - 1788

BiographyBritish painter of portraits, landscapes, and fancy pictures, born at Sudbury, Suffolk. He went to London in or about 1740, where he trained with the French draughtsman and engraver Hubert Gravelot and probably with Francis Hayman; he also no doubt frequented the St Martin's Lane Academy, then in its heyday under the leadership of Hogarth. Still too young, however, to obtain other than menial jobs in London, he returned in 1748, aged 19, to Sudbury, moving to the county town of Ipswich in 1752. His patrons were the local squires and merchants, whose portraits he painted on the scale of life either half-length or head and shoulders, or, alternatively, ‘in little’ but whole-length, alone or with their wives, in landscapes: the finest is Mr and Mrs Andrews (c. 1748–50; London, NG). He also secured some commissions for pure landscapes. His style at this time was a blend of the English, the French, and the Dutch, inclined towards the Rococo and somewhat understated, but infused with a vitality which is purely Gainsborough. Although he was to translate this style into far bolder and more impressive terms later, it remained the key to his approach as an artist for the rest of his life. It represented a decisively different stylistic direction from that taken by the majority of his contemporaries in the 1750s, above all Reynolds, who chose to follow the path of Italy and the classical Grand Manner; it was symptomatic that Gainsborough never travelled abroad.

In 1759, in search of more plentiful and more fashionable patronage, he moved to Bath. All his portraits were now life sized and frequently full-length. To gain the necessary skills of breadth of handling, richness of colour, and mastery of scale, he studied the portraits by van Dyck in nearby country houses (though his drawing of the human figure always remained slightly uncertain). To this period belong many of his most ravishing portraits, such as Mary, Countess Howe (c. 1764; London, Kenwood House), who, dressed in pink, steps lightly towards the spectator through a cloudy, picturesque landscape. A flickering pattern of light and shade cast over the whole composition, highlighting the sitter, distinguishes Gainsborough's portraits of his Bath period. His landscapes, now given added breadth by the influence of Rubens, show similar characteristics and exhale an air of enchantment. Both his portraits and landscapes were sent to London for exhibition, first at the Society of Artists and then at the RA, of which Gainsborough became a founder member in 1768.

In 1774, he settled permanently in London, continuing intermittently to exhibit at the RA but aggrieved that his pictures were often shown in a bad light. His portraits became grander, and sometimes wilder, culminating in full-lengths of the King, Queen, and three eldest princesses, and a set of ovals of the monarchs and their thirteen children (all 1782; London, Royal Coll.). It is one of several contradictions of Gainsborough's character that, while he preferred to paint landscapes, which he nevertheless found difficulty in selling, and despised his aristocratic sitters, whom he thought good only for their money, he was a very successful portrait painter and chose to live, not in the artists' quarter of Soho, but in the West End close to St James's Palace. In his last decade, he experimented with several new types of picture and media, most famously his ‘fancy pictures’. These were paintings of peasants, often children, in landscapes, which were regarded as touchingly simple and affecting by the sophisticated public of the day but which have been interpreted recently as unwitting exposés of the harshness of life in the countryside.

Gainsborough was an original: wholly English in spirit yet more admired abroad today than any other British artist except perhaps Turner.

Kitson, Michael. "Gainsborough, Thomas." In The Oxford Companion to Western Art, edited by Hugh Brigstocke. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/opr/t118/e980 (accessed May 1, 2012).

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