Gainsborough

“ Standing as it did in the most frequented open space of the town, the Gainsborough was far more in evidence than the Town Hall, and even than the High Cross, so that it became a favourite place for demonstrations of all kinds. ”

“ Gainsborough was to be considered, perhaps, rather as a man of delicate taste, and of an elegant and feeling mind, than as a man of genius; as a lover of the art, rather than an artist. He devoted himself to it, with a view to amuse and soothe his mind, with the ease of a gentleman, not with the severity of a professional student. He wished to make his pictures, like himself, amiable; but a too constant desire to please almost unavoidably leads to affectation and effeminacy. He wanted that vigour of intellect, which perceives the beauty of truth ”

“ The grocer has a leaning toward art, for his walls are well papered with chromos and posters; and as he sold a cabbage to a good housewife he nipped off a leaf for a pen of rabbits that stood in the doorway, and talked to me glibly of Reynolds and Gainsborough. The grocer considers Gainsborough the greater artist, and surely his fame is wide, like unto the hat—hated by theater-goers—that his name has rendered deathless, and which certain unkind ones declare has given him immortality. Joshua was the seventh child in the brood of five boys and six girls. ”

“ It is a great privilege to live, to work, to feel, to endure, to know: to realize that one is the instrument of Deity—being used by the Maker to work out His inscrutable purposes; to see vast changes occur in the social fabric and to know that men stop, pause and consider: to comprehend that this world is a different place because you have lived. Yes, it is a great privilege to live! Gainsborough lived—he reveled in life, and filled his days to their brim, ever and always grateful to the Unknown that had guided his hand and led him forth upon his way. ”

“ The trees grow so beautifully about these mounds, and upon the mounds, that it is easy to fill the interspaces with figures from Gainsborough's pictures, ladies in hoops and powdered hair, elegant gentlemen wearing buckled shoes, tail-coats, and the swords which made them gentlemen. Gainsborough did not make his gentlemen plead--that was his fault; but Watteau's ladies put their fans to their lips so archly, asking the pleading lover if he believes all he says, knowing well that his vows are only part of the gracious entertainment. ”

“ Gainsborough was the first to free English landscape from the incubus of the historical tradition. Nowadays we may not find in his landscapes that "portrait-like representation of nature" which Reynolds found there, for the clouds and trees and the life of the country-side appear to us only through the veil of an exquisite artistic temperament, which passes over all that might be hard or ugly or inharmonious. In early life Gainsborough painted the oak with skill and truth, but in his mature work all except the figures and animals was generalized and idealized. ”

“ Nothing can be more attractively luminous or aerial than the distance of the Gainsborough, nothing more bold or inventive than the forms of its crags and the diffusion of the broad distant light upon them, where a vulgar artist would have thrown them into dark contrast. ”

“ He then removed to London, where he added the lucrative branch of portrait-painting to his favourite pursuit of landscape. The permanent splendour of his colours, and the natural and living air which he communicated to whatever he touched, made him at this time, in the estimation of many, a dangerous rival of Sir Joshua himself.
Gainsborough was quite a child of nature, and everything that came from his easel smacked strongly of that raciness, freshness, and originality, the study of nature alone can give. ”

“ However, in all of Gainsborough's landscapes you find the human interest somewhere—man has not been entirely left out. But from being the one important thing, he sinks simply into a part of the view that lies before you. Turner's maxim, "You can not leave man out," he annexed from Gainsborough. And Corot's landscapes, where the dim, shadowy lovers sit on the bankside under the great oaks—the most lovely pictures ever painted by the hand of man—reveal the extreme evolution from a time when the lovers occupied the center of the stage, and the landscape was only an accessory. ”

“ Sir Joshua Reynolds, at one of the Academy dinners, speaking of Gainsborough, said to a friend,—‘He is undoubtedly the best English landscape-painter.’ ‘No,’ said Wilson, who overheard the conversation, ‘he is not the best landscape-painter, but he is the best portrait-painter in England.’ They were both wrong; but the story is creditable to the versatility of Gainsborough’s talents.
Those of his portraits which we have seen are not in the first rank. They are in a good measure imitations of Vandyke; and have more an air of gentility, than of nature. ”

“ GAINSBOROUGH AT THE GROSVENOR GALLERY ‘If ever this nation should produce genius sufficient to acquire for us the honourable distinction of an English School, the name of Gainsborough will be transmitted to posterity, in the history of the art, among the very first of that rising name.’ So wrote, in his Fourteenth Discourse, Sir Joshua Reynolds—a lover of pomp and ceremony even in the art of Literature—doing therein ‘untimely justice’ to the merits of his contemporary, whom he survived. ”

“ It is no disgrace to the genius of Gainsborough to compare him to such men as we sometimes meet with, whose natural eloquence appears even in speaking a language which they can scarce be said to understand; and who, without knowing the appropriate expression of almost any one idea, contrive to communicate the lively and forcible impressions of an energetic mind. ”

“ The delicacy of a refined English complexion has never been so beautifully painted, while the tone and colour is as exquisite as anything Gainsborough ever did. The light transparent blue, cool yellow, crimson, brown, and black, forms an enchanting setting for the lovely head, which stands out clear and delicate. ”

“ That must have been a Suffolk man who passed the following criticism on Gainsborough’s celebrated picture of ‘Girl and Pigs,’ of which Sir Joshua Reynolds became the purchaser at one hundred guineas, though the artist asked but sixty: ‘They be deadly like pigs; but who ever saw pigs feeding together, but one on ’em had a foot in the trough?’ Gainsborough had an enthusiastic attachment to music. It was the favourite amusement of his leisure hours, and his love for it induced him to give one or two concerts to his most intimate acquaintances whilst living in Ipswich. ”

“ It was Leslie who inoculated me with a love of Gainsborough, before whose perfect pictures a spectator involuntarily raises his hat and stands uncovered. (And just here let me advise every art lover who goes to England to visit the little Dulwich Gallery, only a few miles from London, and there to spend an hour or two among the exquisite Gainsboroughs. No small collection in Europe is better worth a visit, and the place itself in summer-time is enchanting with greenery.) ”

“ The student of to-day, the student of Millet, can hardly single out for truthfulness, though he can always single out for grace, the rustics of Gainsborough. Into the realities of peasant life, Gainsborough scarcely even essayed to have any deep entrance. ”

“ Gainsborough was born at Sudbury, in Suffolk, in 1727, where his father was a clothier, and nature the boy’s teacher. He passed his mornings in the woods alone; and in solitary rambles sketched old trees, brooks, a shepherd and his flock, cattle, or whatever his fancy seized on. After painting several landscapes, he arrived in London and received instructions from Gravelot and Hayman: he lived in Hatton-Garden, married a lady with 200l. a year went to Bath, and painted portraits for five guineas, till the demand for his talent enabled him gradually to raise the price to a 100l. ”

“ Ha! It is not very difficult to find anybody, when you know where to look.'
'Pardon me, Colonel Gainsborough, that was precisely not my case. I did not know where to look. I have been here for days now, looking, till I was almost in despair; only I knew you must be somewhere, and I would not despair. I have looked for you in America and in England. I went down to Gainsborough Manor, to see if I could hear tidings of you there. Every time that I came home to Seaforth for a visit I took a week of my vacation and came here and hunted New York for you ”

“ Through the silversmith the artist got admission to an art school and began his studies; but his master was a dissolute fellow, and before long the pupil left him.
Gainsborough was born in the town of Sudbury on the River Stour, the same which inspired another great painter half a century later. Gainsborough is best known by his portraits, in particular as the inventor of "the Gainsborough hat," but he was first of all a truly great landscape painter, and learned his art as Constable did after him, along the beautiful shores of the river that flowed past his native town. ”

“ And had Gainsborough, we may wonder, some further interest in her than that which is aroused in217 any qualified observer of Humanity by the vision of such agreeable beauty? For Gainsborough, as a rule, painted best the models he knew the most. Executing every touch with his own hand, and doing his most picturesque with every model because he was so essentially artistic, he yet must have undertaken many a portrait of fashionable persons or of enriched bourgeois, into the dull recesses of whose character he did not care to penetrate. ”

“ Miss Gainsborough’s drawing-room glowed and shone, prepared for all the brilliance of a historic capital; and anybody might have felt that high expectations sagged a trifle when there presently drifted through the curtained portal the long plain faces of the Clarksons. They, poor creatures, had perhaps the same reflection, discovering me upon the hearth-rug; when for once you dine in the Corso it is flat to encounter the mere Briton to whom you have been kind in your lodging. ”

“ In these days culture and education are supposed to work wonders. In the career of Gainsborough, we note the success of one who had little of either, but who did wonders, nevertheless, by his industry and genius alone. We may note that after Gainsborough left his native town he rarely seems to have visited the place, only occasionally to give his vote on the Tory side. ”

“ Mrs. Gainsborough was much too nervous about falling off to bother about brigands, and at last without any mishap they reached the great castellated gate of Tetuan. It was shut.
“Well, I never saw the like,” said Mrs. Gainsborough. “It’s true, then. We must ring the bell, that’s all.”
The soldier, Mohammed, and Don Alfonso raised their voices in a loud hail, but nobody paid any attention, and the twilight deepened. Mrs. Gainsborough alighted from her mule and thumped at the iron-studded door. Silence answered her. ”

“ The biography of Thomas Gainsborough reads quite differently.
The traveller who rides from London to Birmingham passes through some of the fairest scenery in the island. He finds himself in the heart of fresh and tender English nature. Small rivulets flow through the gently undulating country. Wide meadows clothe the soft hollows in the valleys with abundant green. ”

“ Robinson was a Lincolnshire man. Gainsborough claims him, and on Gainsborough his first solid memorial has been raised. Many are familiar with Gainsborough who have never seen the town. Up the Trent sailed Sweyn, the sanguinary Dane, to conquest; and his son Canute—he that ordered back the rising tide, and got a wetting for his pains—was at Gainsborough when he succeeded him as King of England. ”

“ And herein the great masters separate themselves finally from the inferior ones; for if the men of inferior genius ever express law at all, it is by the sacrifice of individuality. Thus, Salvator Rosa has great perception of the sweep of foliage and rolling of clouds, but never draws a single leaflet or mist wreath accurately. Similarly, Gainsborough, in his landscape, has great feeling for masses of form and harmony of color ”

“ Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) was born in Sudbury, in Suffolk, and when still quite young went to London, and studied under Francis Hayman, who was not an eminent painter. Gainsborough became one of the most important masters of the English school, especially in landscape painting and the representation of rustic figures. His portraits were not as good in color as those of Sir Joshua Reynolds; they have a bluish-gray hue in the flesh tints; but they are always graceful and charming. His landscapes are not like those of any other master. ”

“ So Miss Gainsborough fumed in silence; and the devoted Lady Mullinger, pursued to the last by her fatality, thought it a good opportunity to show that she too was of her dear old friend’s opinion—give her she said in emphatic undertones, a man, a real man, not an effeminate old thing only fit to dance attendance in a drawing-room. “My good woman,” exclaimed Miss Gainsborough coarsely, “it’s late for you to be asking for a man, real or sham. ”

“ In studying Gainsborough’s rustic children as a class, it is noticeable that he emphasizes the pathetic side of their life; instead of a thrifty, tidy appearance, in which England’s village children are by no means lacking, he gives his subjects a careless, neglected air. ”

“ Gainsborough owed little or nothing to the great masters of painting who came before him, and less to any of his contemporaries. His teachers were Nature and his own sympathy with his subject. Nowhere in the work of his maturity is there to be found any trace of imitation of the Dutch or of the Italian masters. He did not pose his models à la Van Dyck, nor did he borrow his palette from Titian; he is the most English of English artists as he is the greatest glory of English art. ”