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Thomas Gainsborough
Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) 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 va-rious than Reynolds. He excelled in two distinct branches of the art, portraiture and landscape, and revealed an un-equalled success in combining the two -- that is, in adjusting the human figure to a background of natural scenery. 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 were 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-of-doors, and thus uniting portraiture with landscape. In his youth he had painted a portrait of Mr and Mrs Andrews sitting in a wheat-fieM - 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.  Joshua Reynolds on the Art of Thomas Gainsborough "Whether he most excelled in portraits, landscapes or fancy-pictures, it is difficult to determine [...] This excel-lence was his own, the result of his particular observation and taste; for this he was certainly not indebted [...] to any School; for his grace was not academical, or antique, but selected by himself from the great school of nature [...] [...] The peculiarity of his manner or style, or we may call it - his language in which he expressed his ideas, has been considered by many, as his greatest defect. But... whether this peculiarity was a defect or not, intermixed, as it was, with great beauties, of some of which it was probably the cause, it becomes a proper subject of criticism and enquiry to a painter. [...] [...] It is certain, that all those odd scratches and marks which, on a close examination, are so observable in Gainsborough's pictures; ... this chaos, this uncouth and shape-less appearance, by a kind of magic, at a certain distance assumes 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 and hasty negligence. [...] [...] It must be allowed, that the hatching manner of Gainsborough did very much contribute to the lightness of effect which is so eminent a beauty in his pictures." [...] 6) Eighteenth Century Lanscape By the time of Hogarth's death in 1764, a new genera-tion had already established itself in London, with a new kind of art and a new attitude to art. By 1750, a number of native-born artists were making very fair .livings in branches other than the "safe" one of portrait-painting. There were distinguished painters in landscape, sea-painting, and animal painting, quite apart from Hogarth's innovation of satirical comic painting. For Englishmen it may be true that landscape and animal painting, and to an extent sea-painting, have always been best loved when they retain something of portraiture - are portraits, in fact, recognizable likenesses of their own parks, houses, or towns, of their cities, of their ships or sea-battles. The best landscapes painted in England at the closje of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centu-ries were topographical in nature. In marine painting the leading figure was Samuel Scott (1702-1772), a contemporary of Hogarth, who began by painting in the manner of Van de Veldes, but who later switched to townscape almost certainly in answer to a demand that had been created by Canaletto. His (Canaletto's) paintings were widely known here, brought back by young Englishmen^as perfect souvenirs, before he himself came in 1746. Scott, following close in Canaletto's footsteps in his views of London, caught perhaps more of the veil of moisture that is almost always in English skies. But Scott lacked the Venetian's spaciousness and the logic of picture-making. Richard Wilson (1714-1782) developed a stronger, more severe style, in which the classic inspiration of the two French masters of the Italian landscape, Claude and GaspardPoussin, is very clear; as also, rather later, is that'of "the broad shimmering golden visions of the Dutchman, Cuyp. Wilson's English work of the sixties and seventies, more various than is often thought, is at its best of a calm, sunbasking, poetic distinction; to the English landscape he transferred something of the miraculously lucid Roman light, in which objects in the countryside can seem to group themselves consciously into picture. On other occasions Wilson found in the Welsh and in the English scene a ra-diant yet brooding tenderness, the placid mystery of wide stretches of water, over which the eye is drawn deep into the picture to the far Haze on the horizon where sight seems to melt. Sometimes he also made a bid to align his compositions with the classic example of Claude by peopling them with classic or mythological figures. The most remarkable of Gainsborough's landscapes have, in fact, only found a full appreciation this century. These are very early landscapes, painted in Suffolk about 1750; strictly they are not pure landscapes as they include portraits, but the synthesis of the two genres is so perfect that the pictures become portraits of more than a person - of a whole way of life, of a country gentry blooming modestly and naturally among their woods and fields, their parks and lakes. The directness of characterization is so traightforward as to seem almost naive. The light on land and tree and water has a rainwashed brilliance, and a strange tension of stillness - sometimes it is almost a thunderlight. In his later pure landscapes, the woodenness melts under the brush of a painter who loved the radiant shimmering fluency of his medium as perhaps no other English painter has ever done. Wilson and Gainsborough form the two main peaks in eighteenth century landscape painting. Gainsborough's Landscapes As a landscape painter Gainsborough was influenced in his early years by Dutch seventeenth century pictures seen in East Anglia; and the landscape backgrounds in his Ipswich period portraits are all in that tradition. But during his Bath period he saw paintings by Rubens and thereafter that influence is apparent in his landscape compositions. The landscapes of Gainsborough's maturity have spontaneity deriving from the light rapid movement of his brush;- but they are not rapid sketches from nature, he never painted out-of-doors; he painted his landscapes in his studio from his drawings, and from the scenes which , he constructed in a kind of model theatre, where he took bits of cork and vegetables and so on and moved them about, and moved the light about, till he had arranged a composi-tion. It is possible that some of his preliminary black and white chalk landscape drawings were done out-of-doors; but the majority were done in the studio from memory when he returned from his walk or ride; and some of the finest of the drawings, the "Horses by a Shed", for example, resulted perhaps from a combination of the two procedures - a rough pencil note made on the spot and reconsidered in terms of composition with the aid of his candle and the model theatre after dinner. At his highest level he went far beyond the current formulae and achieved a degree of integrated three-dimensional arrangement. Wilson's "River Scene with Bathers" Probably the most lasting impression made on many people by Richard Wilson's "River Scene with Bathers" is of the golden light that suffuses the painting. It is a sort of light we associate with a warm summer evening. Actual sunlight doesn't often have such a mellow tone, but this colour accords perfectly with the image many of us hold of what evening light ideally should be. Almost everything about this painting has a similar elysian quality. None of us has seen a view exactly like this one, and yet it immediately strikes a sympathetic chord: the cattle lazing in the late sun while the herders take a swim; the softly rounded hills with masses of unruffled foliage; the quiet river meandering toward the distant mountain and the still more distant, unclouded horizon. There is even a ruined temple, picturesquely placed as a gentle reminder of the transitory character of man's achievement in the face of nature. Eve-rything about this painting contributes to this idyllic mood. It is a little too good to be true; but we wish it might be true. Richard Wilson himself had never seen this view any more than we have, because it does not exist. It was for him, as it is for us, an ideal landscape, sensitively developed in his imagination from his recollections of things encountered, both in nature and in art. It was an attitude that was widely accepted in Wilson's day. The artistic climate that produced a painting such as "River Scene with Bathers" is akin to that which accounts for "Mrs Siddons as the Tragic Muse". Underlying the interest in creating an "ideal" landscape was the assumption that art should aspire to something more than mere sensuous gratification; that it should elevate the thoughts of the spectator and purge his mind of petty considerations. This was to be achieved both by what was included and (equally important) the way in which it was represented. The scene, with its ruin, spacious vista, and warm summer light, is meant to remind us of Italy, or at least the Mediterranean area, and to arouse by association a train of thought concerned with pastoral idylls of the classical past. But this effect is strongly supported by the way in which Wilson has organized the elements in his painting to sustain a mood of quiet and repose. The picture is carefully balanced around the centrally placed ruin. The hill to the right finds just the proper counter-poise in the distant mountain and the broad stretch of valley to the left. The group of bathers on the left is balanced by the cattle on the right. The whole view is enframed by trees on either side and set comfortably back in space by a dark' foreground ledge. The sense of balance involves many factors, including shape, light, texture and distance. Nothing appears forced, but every element in the picture has been conceived and placed with regard to its relation to the whole. | |
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