Thomas Gainsborough
Thomas Gainsborough was born in Sudbury, Suffolk, in
1727, the son of John Gainsborough, a cloth merchant. He soon evinced a marked
inclination for drawing and in 1740 his father sent him to London to study art.
He stayed in London for eight years, working under the rococo portrait-engraver
Gravelot; he also became familiar with the Flemish tradition of painting, which
was highly prized by London art dealers at that time. "Road through Wood,
with Boy Resting and Dog", 1747 is a typical 'genre painting', obviously
influenced by Ruisdael. In Many aspects this work recalls Constable's
"Cornfield".
In 1750 Gainsborough moved to Ipswich where his
professional career began in earnest. He executed a great many small-sized
portraits as well as landscapes of a decorative nature. In October 1759
Gainsborough moved to Bath. In Bath he became a much sought-after and
fashionable artist, portraying the aristocracy, wealthy merchants, artists and
men of letters. He no longer produced small paintings but, in the manner of
Van Dyck, turned to full-length, life-size portraits. From 1774 to 1788 (the
year of his death) Gainsborough lived in London where he divided his time
between portraits and pictorial compositions, inspired by Geior-gione, which
Reynolds defined as "fancy pictures" ("The Wood Gatherers",
1787). As a self-taught artist, he did not make the traditional grand tour or
the ritual journey to Italy, but relied on his own remarkable instinct in
painting.
Gainsborough is famous for the elegance of his
portraits and his pictures of women in particular have an extreme delicacy and
refinement. As a colourist he has had few rivals among English painters. His
best works have those delicate brush strokes which are found in Rubens and
Renoir. They are painted in clear and transparent tone, in a colour scheme
where blue and green predominate.
The particular discovery of Gainsborough was the
creation of a form of art in which the sitters and the background merge into a
single entity. The landscape is not kept in the background, but in most cases
man and nature are fused in a single whole through the atmospheric harmony of
mood; he emphasized that the natural background for his characters neither was,
nor ought to be, the drawing-room or a reconstruction of historical events, but
the changeable and harmonious manifestations of nature, as revealed both in the
fleeting moment and in the slowly evolving seasons. In the portrait of
"Robert Andrews and Mary, His Wife", for example, the beauty of the
green English summer is communicated to the viewer through the sense of
well-being and delight which the atmosphere visibly creates in the sitters.
Gainsborough shows the pleasure of resting on a rustic bench in the cool shade
of an oak tree, while all around the ripe harvest throbs in a hot atmosphere
enveloped by a golden light.
Emphasis is nearly always placed on the season in both
the landscapes and the portraits, from the time of Gainsborough's early works
until the years of his late maturity: from the burning summer sun in
"Robert Andrews and Mary, His Wife" to the early autumn scene in
"The Market Cart", painted in 1786—1787, a work penetrated throughout
by the richness and warmth of colour of the season, by its scents of drenched
earth and marshy undergrowth.
It is
because his art does not easily fall within a well-defined theoretical system
that it became a forerunner of the romantic movement, with its feeling for
nature and the uncertainty and anxiety experienced by sensitive men when
confronted with nature: "Mary, Countess Howe" (1765), "The Blue
Boy" (1770), "Elizabeth and Mary Linley" (1772), "Mrs. Hamilton
Nisbet" (1785).
The marriage
portrait "The Morning Walk", painted in 1785, represents the
perfection of Gainsborough's later style and goes beyond portraiture to an
ideal conception of dignity and grace in the harmony of landscape and figures.
Gainsborough neither had not desired pupils,
but his art — ideologically and technically entirely different from that of his
rival Reynolds — had a considerable influence on the artists of the English
school who followed him. The landscapes, especially those of his late manner,
anticipate Constable, the marine paintings, Turner. His output includes about
eight hundred portraits and more than two hundred landscapes.
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