Thomas Gainsborough

“ GAINSBOROUGH'S EARLY LIFE—IPSWICH AND BATH
Thomas Gainsborough was born at Sudbury in Suffolk in May 1727; he was thus four years younger than Reynolds, thirteen years younger than Wilson. He came from [Pg 26] a respectable family of old standing and in comfortable circumstances. His father, John Gainsborough, was a clothier by trade, and of his mother little is known save that she was a gentle and kind woman, very indulgent to her children. They had four daughters and five sons, of whom Thomas was the youngest. Thomas was far from diligent at school ”

“ He was a mannerist, and, though successful in his own time, is very mortal. |Gainsborough.| Close on his knightly heels came one of the true immortals, Thomas Gainsborough, one of the best portrait-painters the world has ever seen. His landscapes, though better than any up to his time, are not good, and his reputation rests chiefly on his power in portraiture, in which he was certainly a master. Naturalism breathes from his canvas ”

“ The poet, too, has the advantage of exhibiting his ideas in succession, and he avails himself of stops and pauses; but the great painter is obliged to set his entire subject before the eye at once, and all the parts of his composition, his imagination, and his execution, challenge the judgment as a whole. A great poet is nevertheless a just object of admiration among ordinary persons—but far more so a great painter, who assumes the power of creation, and of improving on the ordinary combinations of the Creator. Yet such a man was Thomas Gainsborough, before whose modest tomb I stood! ”

“ Jackson, who lent it for the exhibition of Gainsborough's work held at the Grosvenor Gallery, in 1885.
While Thomas was with his first master, by no means a good companion for a lad of fifteen, he lived a busy, self-respecting life, since he was devoted to his home and to his parents. Only three years after he set out to learn his art he married a young lady of Sudbury. The pair were by no means rich, Gainsborough having only eighteen years of experience in this world, besides his brush, and a maker of woolen-crape shrouds for a father--who was not over pleased to have an artist for a son. ”

“ What is agreeable in one sphere of life is offensive in another. A dirty smock frock and a soiled face in a ploughman's child who has been swinging on rustic gates a long summer morning or rolling down the slopes of hills, or grubbing in the soil of his small garden, may remind us, not unpleasantly, of one of Gainsborough's pictures; but we look for a different sort of nature on the canvas of Sir Joshua Reynolds or Sir Thomas Lawrence, or in the brilliant drawing-rooms of the nobility; and yet an Earl's child looks and moves at least as naturally as a peasant's. ”

“ There seems to have been no artist, with the extraordinary exceptions of Dürer and Leonardo, who learned his lessons while at school. Little painters have uniformly begun as bad spellers.
Gainsborough's father was in the business of woolen-crape making, while his mother painted flowers, very nicely, and it was she who taught the small Thomas. ”

“ From a fireproof safe to liberal theology is but a step, and Humphrey Gainsborough became a Dissenting Clergyman, passing rich on forty pounds a year.
The hopes of the family finally centered on Thomas. He had assisted his brother John at the sign-painting, and had done several creditable little things in drawing 'scutcheons on coach-doors for the gentry. Besides all this, once, while sketching in his father's orchard, a face cautiously appeared above the stone wall and for a single moment studied the situation. The boy caught the features on his palette, and transferred them to his picture. ”

“ Gainsborough, Thomas, one of England's greatest artists in portrait and landscape painting, born at Sudbury, Suffolk; he early displayed a talent for drawing, and at 14 was sent to London to study art; when 19 he started as a portrait-painter at Ipswich, having by this time married Margaret Burr, a young lady with £200 a year; patronised by Sir Philip Thicknesse, he removed in 1760 to Bath, where he rose into high favour, and in 1774 he sought a wider field in London; he shared the honours of painting portraits with Reynolds and of landscape with Wilson ”

“ Besides painting his portrait and being a firm friend, Gainsborough wrote wisely warning him against his natural tendency to over-eating and conviviality [see a quotation from this letter in art. Gainsborough, Thomas] . ”

“ Gainsborough was tall, fair and handsome, generous, impulsive to the point of capriciousness, easily irritated, not of bookish likings, a lively talker, good at repartee. He was a most thorough embodiment of the artistic temperament; delighting in nature and “the look of things,” insatiable in working, fond of music and the theatre hardly less than of painting—a warm, rich personality, to whom severe principle was perhaps as foreign as deliberate wrong-doing. ”

“ COOPER, THOMAS (1805–1892) , chartist, born in Leicester on 20 March 1805, was the son of a working dyer. The family removed to Exeter when Cooper was a few months old, and there his father died three years afterwards. The widow returned to Gainsborough and opened a business in dyeing and fancy box making. Cooper was admitted into a bluecoat school, and remained there until 1820, when, after a trial of the sea, he was apprenticed to a shoemaker. ”

“ In many of his pictures he put a cart and a white animal.
His rustic figures have the true country life in them: they seem to have fed upon the air, and warmed themselves in the sun until they are plump and rosy as country lads and lasses should be. His best genre pictures are the “Cottage Girl,” the “Woodman and Dog in a Storm,” the “Cottage Door,” and the “Shepherd Boy in a Shower.” He painted a picture of a “Girl and Pigs,” for which Sir Joshua Reynolds paid him one hundred guineas.
In character Gainsborough was very attractive, though somewhat contradictory in his moods. ”

“ Everybody approved of them, but it is said they were returned to him till they "stood ranged in long lines from his hall to his painting room" Gainsborough was a member of the Royal Academy and also a true Bohemian. He cared little for elegant society, but made his friends among men of genius of all sorts. He was very handsome and impulsive, tall and fair, and generous in his ways; but he had much sorrow on account of one of his daughters, Mary, who married Fischer, a hautboy player, against her father's wishes. ”

“ The heavy negligence happily describes the fault of the manner. It is horribly manifest in that magnitude of vulgarity for landscape, the "Market Cart" in our National Gallery, and purchased at we know not what vast sum, and presented by the governors of the institution to the nation. We have a very high opinion of the genius of Gainsborough; but we do not see it in his landscapes, with very few exceptions. His portraits have an air of truth never exceeded, and that set off with great power and artistical skill ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is perhaps the general fault of Gainsborough, that he presents us with an ideal common life, whereas it is only the reality that is here good for any thing. His subjects are softened and sentimentalised too much, it is not simple, unaffected nature that we see, but nature sitting for her picture. Gainsborough, we suspect, from some of the pictures in this collection, led the way to that masquerade style, which piques itself on giving the air of an Adonis to the driver of a hay-cart, and models the features of a milk-maid on the principles of the antique. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Not altogether liking some of his subjects, we cannot but admire the skill in their treatment, the warm glow in the colouring, and true character of some of his woods running off in perspective are most pleasing. He does not aim at sentiment. He often reminds us of Gainsborough's best manner; but he is superior to him always, in subject, in composition, and in variety. He has great skill in the transparency and clearness of his tones. ”

“ Gainsborough, with his refined Roman nose, the haughty, curved sensuous lips, and the expression of his face which speaks at once of innocence and refinement, gives an impression far more than Reynolds of the child of nature and the gentleman. His cheeks are fresh and rather ruddy; a depth of soul lies within the large blue eyes, that are somewhat melancholy, yet have such a free outlook upon life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ That boy's name was Jack Hill and he did not care for city life, nor maybe for Gainsborough's eccentricities, so he ran away. He was found again and again, till one day he got away for good, and never came back.
All his later life Gainsborough was happy. His daughter, who had married Fischer, the hautboy-player, came back home to live, and her disorder was not bad enough to prevent her being a cause of great happiness to her father. The other daughter never married. ”

“ But there is little known about his life in London, except what can be gathered from a few letters, a few anecdotes, and the names of his sitters. His home life seems to have been a happy one. Mrs. Gainsborough has been described as the kindest as well as the loveliest of wives, and he is said to have liked nothing so well of an evening as sitting by his wife making one rapid sketch after another. Though the quickness of his temper or other cause occasionally provoked a quarrel, it was of short duration. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As he advances, however, he grows bolder, and altogether discards his theory of judging of the artist by the class to which he belongs—‘But we have the sanction of all mankind,’ he says, ‘in preferring genius in a lower rank of art, to feebleness and insipidity in the highest.’ This is in speaking of Gainsborough. ”

“ I will not descant upon Tom’s wines; I don’t wish to make other people envious. Only it was all inexpressibly good, from fascinating Mrs. Gainsborough and her diamonds, down.
I felt a peculiar interest in Mrs. Gainsborough, because, in addition to her other attractions, she was a countrywoman of mine—that is to say, an American. She was brunette, slender, graceful; with a weird expression of the eyes under straight black eyebrows, an expression which somehow suggested mesmerism—or perhaps a liability on her part to be mesmerised; faultless throat and shoulders ”

“ Gainsborough began as a portrait and landscape painter in Hatton Garden, but finding little patronage during four years of his sojourn there, returned to his native town. In 1760 he removed to Bath, and found a favorable field for portrait painting, though landscape was not neglected. Fourteen years later Gainsborough, no longer an unknown artist, came to London and rented part of Schomberg House, Pall Mall. He was now regarded as the rival of Reynolds in portraiture, and of Wilson in landscape. ”

“ There are, of course, larger works not claiming less attention; and one and all, by their deficiencies as well as by their merits, show that the greatness or the general attractiveness of Gainsborough as a landscape painter is due not much to his naturalism—which was naturalism only in his own day, and is seen to have been almost idealism in ours. His greatness as a landscape painter consists much more in his continual endowment of Nature with the grace and magic of Style. ”

“ 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. ”