InfoBritain - Travel Through History In The UK :
Thomas Gainsborough Biography And Visits
Thomas Gainsborough Biography And Visits
Statue of Gainsborough in Sudbury
The art world in the second quarter of the eighteenth century was severely restricted. "The academic theory of the hierarchy of painting in which subjects drawn from the Bible or from ancient history ranked highest because they conveyed eternal truths was accepted dogma with the cultivated connoisseur." (Gainsborough by John Hayes P29) Lower down the hierarchy there was a market in painting views, and in pastiches of the landscape artists, Claude or Gaspard, usually for decorative purposes. But the main, and perhaps only way in which an artist could make a living was in the painting of portraits, of people, and their dogs and horses. There was little serious patronage of the arts in England at this time, and the setting up of the Royal Academy had done little to change the situation. Thomas Gainsborough, the son of a well-to-do Suffolk weaver had arrived in London in 1740 to train as an artist after showing talent as a boy. He mixed with the promising young artists of the time, "the Martin's Lane set" who set out to change London's artistic scene. This group was anti-establishment, anti-academic, and like most talented young men from any age, naturally inclined to oppose outworn tradition. Gainsborough, training with William Gravelot, and then with Hogarth's school, spent the years of his artistic education amongst the St Martin's Lane set. He joined in some of their exciting new projects, such as providing art for the pleasure gardens at Vauxhall, owned by Jonathon Tyers, collector of avant-garde art and the most generous benefactor of English art at the time. The Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens were a central part of the London social scene, and working on artistic projects for them must have been quite a thrill. Sadly this great symbol of a new emerging culture no longer exists. All that is left is the small green space of Spring Gardens close to Vauxhall station. A better idea of how the gardens once looked can be gained by visiting that other great eighteenth century pleasure garden, Ranleagh Gardens in Chelsea, where the Chelsea Flower Show takes place.
Gainsborough's House in Sudbury
Many a university graduate knows the sadness of leaving the freedom of student years and settling down to the mundane reality of working life. Gainsborough set up a practice in London. After a remarkable early landscape painting The Charterhouse, evoking a summer's day in London, it became clear that landscapes would not pay the bills. With his new wife Margaret, Gainsboroug moved back to his home village of Sudbury in Suffolk and got on with the reality of work as an artist, which meant portraits. A living had to be made, and Gainsborough was not a natural innovator. Inspite of hanging around with the St Martin's Lane set he was no firebrand revolutionary,and was not going to starve in a garret painting pictures which would only sell after he was dead. Gainsborough was a charming, down to earth sort of man, who had little time for general causes, avoided committee meetings at the Academy, and certainly did not set out to change the world. That kind of thing was "out of his way." He simply put his energy and talent into keeping his clients happy. But it was precisely his lack of earnestness that allowed him to see through the cant of his day and bring a direct freshness to his painting. Gainsborough's portraits provided striking likenesses, and, inspite of all the fine clothes put on for the occassion, a sense of informality and life. This kind of feeling is summed up by the charming portrait of Gainsborough's two young daughters Mary and Margaret chasing a butterfly. People so often tend to look at the world through the lense of contemporary preconceptions. You can imagine Gainsborough shrugging his shoulders and seeing things as they were.
Gainsborough life was then governed by the dictates of the portrait trade. Business was slow in Sudbury, so the couple, and their two young daughters moved to Ipswich in 1752, and then Bath in 1759. Here commissions came in quickly, and Gainsborough's reputation grew, so much so that in 1769 he was invited to become one of the founding members of the Royal Academy of Arts. This may have been a flattering invitation, but it entailed all those boring committee meetings. Gainsborough's relationship with the Academy was never strong, and he stopped exhibiting his pictures there after only a few years. By the time the Gainsborough family moved to Schomberg House in Pall Mall in 1774 a reputation as one of England's best portrait painters had been establised. He was the royal family's favourite painter, and recieved many royal commissions. The frontage of Schomberg House in Pall Mall still survives, although the building behind has been rebuilt.
Joshua Reynolds, the first president of the Royal Academy of Arts thought a portrait had to rise above fashion by avoiding a contemporary look. A timeless quality, apparently, was achieved by putting a subject in some kind of mythical or generalised setting. Gainsborugh painted what he saw, peope dressed up for the big occassion of getting themselves painted. I personally love the portrait of his attractive wife Margaret, painted around 1778, where she appears to be reaching up to check that the lace around her hair is straight. Fashion is timelss in its changes, and somehow in capturing these moments, Gainsborugh finds a universal quality. There was a seriousness in Gainsborough which was somehow set free by the man who liked to party. In a letter to William Chambers in 1783, he wrote: "...you know my cunning way of avoiding great subjects in painting and conceling my Ignorance with a flash in the pan; if I can do this, whilst I pick pockets in the Portraits two or three years longer I intend to seak into a Cot and turn a serious fellow." (London 27th April 1783: Quoted in Gainsborough P32) The painting Two Shepherd Boys with dogs fighting of 1783 is an example of Gainsborough's personal, unacademic seriousness. Gainsborough hated suffering and cruelty, and in this picture a dog fight is witnessed by two boys. One is enjoying the fight, trying to restrain his friend who is intent on getting the dogs apart. This reflects sadly on the duality of human nature. Then again, the virtuous boy trying to stop the fight is about the strike the dogs with a stick, and there is something oddly incongruous about the cruel character of the picture showing his malignancy in attempting to block his friend's blow. The dark and light sides of humanity are difficult to disentangle. In a similar way the revolutionary and the conservative sides of Gainsborough are also difficult to disentangle. One led to the other.
Gainsborough died on the 2nd of August 1788, and Joshua Reynolds paid tribute to him by dedicating his Christmas lecture at the Royal Academy that year wholly to Gainsborough. Reynolds, the great establishment figure, president of the Royal Academy, had an almost guilty love of Gainsborough's work. He realised his contemporary's straight forward ways had achieved something that the serious minded academic artists had missed:
"I confess I take more interest in, and am more captivated with, the powerful impression of nature, which Gainsborough exhibited in his portraits and in the landscapes, and the interesting simplicity and elegance of his little ordinary beggar children than with any of the world of that [Roman] School... I lay myself open to censure ad ridicule of the academical professors of toher nations, in preferring the humbleattempts of Gainsborough to the works of those regular graduates in the great historical style. But we have the sanction of all mankinf in preferring genius in thelower rank of art, to feebleness and insipidity in the highest." (SirJoshuaReynolds Discourseson Art P248. Quoted Gainsborough P11)