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Born on 14 May 1860:
Bruno Andreas Liljefors, Swedish painter who died on
18 December 1939, specialized in Wildlife.
— He studied at the Konstakademi in Stockholm (1879–1882). During a trip abroad in 1882–1883 he attended lectures by the German animal painter Carl Friedrich Deiker [–1892] in Düsseldorf, where he also made animal studies at the city zoo, one of the largest in Europe. He concluded his travels by visiting France in 1883–1884 and again in 1886. For a while he was a member of the Scandinavian artists’ colony in Grez-sur-Loing and he exhibited at the Salon in Paris in 1884. The influence of both French plein-air painting and Japanese woodcuts is apparent in his first important work, Hawk and Black Game (1884), a ‘close-up’ of nature that fills the whole picture surface. The birds’ struggle in the center of the painting is depicted with detailed precision, and the animals’ lightning movements at the moment of attack are accurately caught. The surroundings are smoothly sketched in pale gray tones. — LINKS — A Sea Eagle Chasing Eider Duck (1912, 88x136cm) — Eluding the Fox (1912, 71x102cm) — A Family of Foxes (1905, 70x100cm) — Hawk Attacking Prey (1900, 81x116cm) |
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Born on 14 May 1887: Andrew Michael Dasburg,
French-born US painter, specialized in the
US West, who died in 1979. — 1892 Emigrated to U.S. with mother to New York City — 1902 Studied with Robert Henri — 1902 Studied at Art Students League — 1907 Back to Paris to visit Matisse and Leo Stein — 1913 Exhibited in the Armory Show New York — 1921 Moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico — 1925 Second Prize Pan American Exhibition Los Angeles — 1927 Third Prize at 26th International of Painting Carnegie Institute — 1931 Allegheny Garden Club Prize Carnegie International — 1932 Awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship — 1933 Moved to Taos, New Mexico. — Andrew Dasburg was born in Paris, and moved to the US at the age of 5. Dasburg was trained in New York at the Art Students League under Birge Harrison, with whom Dasburg would later have stylistic difficulties. Dasburg was an avowed modernist, likely influenced by his studies in Paris, and his introduction to the works of Cezanne, among others. Returning to the US, Dasburg exhibited at the pivotal Armory Exhibition in 1913 as a member of the Synchromist Movement. Dasburg later moved to Taos, New Mexico, where he was criticized by local artists, but, nonetheless credited with bringing national attention to the region. Born in Paris, Andrew Dasburg became a pioneer of US modernism. He was a master teacher at Woodstock, New York where he rebelled against the traditional approach of John Fabian Carlson and Birge Harrison. In 1918, Dasburg began trips to Taos, New Mexico at the invitation of Mabel Dodge Luhan, and he later settled there. In New York, he studied at the Art Students League with Kenyon Cox and Birge Harrison, whose tonalist style he countered by helping to form a group called the Sunflower Club, dedicated to using bright colors. He then went to France. He exhibited in the Armory Show of 1913 and is associated with American Synchromist painters of that time, having shared a house at Woodstock with Synchromist leader Morgan Russell. Dasburg was a proponent of Cézanne and criticized by Taos Artists for being too closely associated with that artist. Dasburg is credited with being a major factor in bringing Taos artists art to the attention of the general public. — Apples (1920) — Chantet Lane (1926) — Still Life with Fruit (1931) — Taos Landscape (1931, 37x52cm) — Ranchos de Taos Landscape (1933) — Rolling Hills (33x41cm) — Bent Street, Taos, New Mexico (1922, 32x39cm) — Seated Nude (sketch) |
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Baptized (soon after birth) on 14 May
1727: Thomas Gainsborough, English Rococo
era and Romantic
painter, draftsman, and printmaker, specialized in Portraits,
who died on 02 August 1788; uncle of Gainsborough
Dupont [1754-1794], the son of Gainsborough's sister, Sarah, and her
husband, Philip Dupont, a carpenter in Sudbury. Since 1772 he was Gainsborough's
student and, after his formal apprenticeship was completed, he remained
as a studio assistant. After the uncle's death, he pursued a career as a
portrait painter and landscapist; his style was wholly influenced by his
uncle's. (Thomas Gainsborough's Portrait
of Gainsborough Dupont, 1775). — Gainsborough was born in Suffolk, the fifth son of a wool merchant. He studied at Saint Martin's Lane Academy in London from 1740 to 1748 under Hubert Gravelot, an engraver and illustrator in the French rococo style, and Francis Hayman, a painter of small portrait groups. To support himself, Gainsborough copied and repaired seventeenth-century Dutch landscapes, notably those of Jan Wynants and Jacob van Ruisdael, which were popular with English collectors. He was an acknowledged landscape painter by 1748 when he presented The Charterhouse to the Foundling Hospital. He returned to Suffolk in 1748, eventually settling in Ipswich as a portrait painter. From 1759 to 1774 Gainsborough lived in Bath, the fashionable resort of the aristocracy, where he deliberately refined his portrait style in the manner of Anthony van Dyck. He exhibited at the Society for Artists in London from 1761 to 1768, and was invited to be a founding member of the Royal Academy in 1768. After several disagreements with the academy over the hanging of his pictures, Gainsborough withdrew and exhibited his work annually from 1784 at Schomberg House, his London residence. Gainsborough died in August 1788, and later that year his great rival Sir Joshua Reynolds paid special tribute to this artist in his fourteenth discourse to the Royal Academy. First interest in his printmaking from Max Friedländer just before 1914. Important in development of processes of aquatint and soft ground etching. Peter Toms was an assistant of Gainsborough. — Gainsborough was the contemporary and rival of Joshua Reynolds, who honored him on 10 December 1788 with a Valedictory Discourse, in which he stated: ‘If ever this nation should produce genius sufficient to acquire to us the honourable distinction of an English School, the name of Gainsborough will be transmitted to posterity, in the history of Art, among the very first of that rising name.’ He went on to consider Gainsborough’s portraits, landscapes and fancy pictures within the Old Master tradition, against which, in his view, modern painting had always to match itself. Reynolds was acknowledging a general opinion that Gainsborough was one of the most significant painters of their generation. Less ambitious than Reynolds in his portraits, Gainsborough nevertheless painted with elegance and virtuosity. He founded his landscape manner largely on the study of northern European artists and developed a very beautiful and often poignant imagery of the British countryside. By the mid-1760s he was making formal allusions to a wide range of previous art, from Rubens and Watteau to, eventually, Claude and Titian. He was as various in his drawings and was among the first to take up the new printmaking techniques of aquatint and soft-ground etching. Because his friend, the musician and painter William Jackson [1730–1803], claimed that Gainsborough detested reading, there has been a tendency to deny him any literacy. He was, nevertheless, as his surviving letters show, verbally adept, extremely witty and highly cultured. He loved music and performed well. He was a person of rapidly changing moods, humorous, brilliant and witty. At the time of his death he was expanding the range of his art, having lived through one of the more complex and creative phases in the history of British painting. He painted with unmatched skill and bravura; while giving the impression of a kind of holy innocence, he was among the most artistically learned and sophisticated painters of his generation. It has been usual to consider his career in terms of the rivalry with Reynolds that was acknowledged by their contemporaries; while Reynolds maintained an intellectual and academic ideal of art, Gainsborough grounded his imagery on contemporary life, maintaining an aesthetic outlook previously given its most powerful expression by William Hogarth. His portraits, landscapes and subject pictures are only now coming to be studied in all their complexity; having previously been viewed as being isolated from the social, philosophical and ideological currents of their time, they have yet to be fully related to them. It is clear, however, that his landscapes and rural pieces, and some of his portraits, were as significant as Reynolds acknowledged them to be in 1788. ^ — Gainsborough was born in Sudbury, Suffolk. He showed artistic ability at an early age, and when he was 15 years old he studied drawing and etching in London with the French engraver Hubert Gravelot. Later he studied painting with Francis Hayman, a painter of historical events. Through Gravelot, who had been a pupil of the great French painter Antoine Watteau, Gainsborough came under Watteau's influence. Later he was also influenced by the painters of the Dutch school and by the Flemish painter Sir Anthony van Dyck. From 1745 to 1760 Gainsborough lived and worked in Ipswich. From 1760 to 1774 he lived in Bath, a fashionable health resort, where he painted numerous portraits and landscapes. In 1768 he was elected one of the original members of the Royal Academy of Arts; and in 1774 he painted, by royal invitation, portraits of King George III and the queen consort, Charlotte Sophia. Gainsborough settled in London the same year. He was the favorite painter of the British aristocracy, becoming wealthy through commissions for portraits. Gainsborough died in London. Gainsborough made more than 500 paintings, of which more than 200 are portraits. His portraits are characterized by the noble and refined grace of the figures, by poetic charm, and by cool and fresh colors, chiefly greens and blues, thinly applied. Among his world-famous portraits are Orpin, the Parish Clerk; The Baillie Family (1784) and Mrs. Siddons (1785); Perdita Robinson (1781); The Hon. Francis Duncombe (1777); (1787); The Blue Boy (1779). His portrait Mr. and Mrs. Andrews (1750) is unusually balanced between portrait and landscape painting. The effect of poetic melancholy induced by faint lighting characterizes Gainsborough's paintings. He was obviously influenced by Dutch 17th-century landscape painting. Forest scenes, or rough and broken country, are the usual subjects of his landscapes, most notably Cornard Wood (1748) and The Watering Place (1777). Gainsborough also made many memorable drawings and etchings. — English portrait and landscape painter, the most versatile English painter of the 18th century. Some of his early portraits show the sitters grouped in a landscape (Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, 1750). As he became famous and his sitters fashionable, he adopted a more formal manner that owed something to Anthony Van Dyck (The Blue Boy, 1770). His landscapes are of idyllic scenes. During his last years he also painted seascapes and idealized full-size pictures of rustics and country children. Gainsborough was the youngest son of John Gainsborough, a maker of woolen goods. When he was 13, he persuaded his father to send him to London to study on the strength of his promise at landscape. He worked as an assistant to Hubert Gravelot, a French painter and engraver and an important figure in London art circles at the time. From him Gainsborough learned something of the French Rococo idiom, which had a considerable influence on the development of his style. In 1746 in London he married Margaret Burr, the illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Beaufort (The Artist's Wife, 1758). Soon afterward he returned to Suffolk and settled in Ipswich in 1752; his daughters Mary and Margaret were born in 1748 and 1752, respectively. In Ipswich Gainsborough met his first biographer, Philip Thicknesse. He early acquired some reputation as a portrait and landscape painter and made an adequate living. |
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Gainsborough declared that his first love was landscape and began to learn
the language of this art from the Dutch 17th-century landscapists, who by
1740 were becoming popular with English collectors; his first landscapes
were influenced by Jan Wynants.
The earliest dated picture with a landscape background is a study of a bull
terrier — Bumper—A Bull Terrier (1745), in which many
of the details are taken straight from Wynants. But by 1748, when he painted
Cornard Wood, Jacob
van Ruisdael had become the predominant influence; although it is full
of naturalistic detail, Gainsborough probably never painted directly from
nature. The Charterhouse, one of his few topographical views, dates
from the same year as Cornard Wood and in the subtle effect of
light on various surfaces proclaims Dutch influence. In the background to
Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, he anticipates the realism of the great English
landscapist of the next century, John Constable, but for the most part fancy
held sway. In many of the early
landscapes the influence of Rococo design learned from Gravelot is evident,
together with a feeling for the French pastoral tradition. The Woodcutter
Courting a Milkmaid is an Anglicized version of a French theme, which
recalls compositions by Fragonard.
Although Gainsborough preferred landscape, he knew he must paint portraits
for economic reasons. The small heads painted in Suffolk, although sometimes
rather stiff, are penetrating character studies delicately and freely pencilled,
particularly the jaunty self-portrait in a cocked hat at Houghton. Gainsborough
painted few full-length portraits in Suffolk. Mr. William Woollaston, although
an ambitious composition, is intimate and informal. The The
Painter's Daughters Chasing a Butterfly, composed in the last years
at Ipswich, is, in its easy naturalism and sympathetic understanding, one
of the best English portraits of children. As well as straight portraits, he painted in Suffolk a number of delightful spontaneous groups of small figures in landscapes closely related to conversation pieces. Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, which has been described as the most English of English pictures, is set in a typical Suffolk landscape. Lady and Gentleman in Landscape is more Frenchified, with its vivacious Rococo rhythms, but Heneage Lloyd and His Sister is more stylized, the charming little figures being posed against a conventional background of steps and decorative urns. To obtain a wider public, Gainsborough moved in 1759 to Bath, where his studio was soon thronged with fashionable sitters. He moved in musical and theatrical circles, and among his friends were members of the Linley family, whose portraits he painted. At Bath he also met the actor David Garrick, for whom he had a profound admiration and whom he painted on many occasions. His passion for music and the stage continued throughout his life. In the west country he visited many of the great houses and at Wilton fell under the spell of Anthony Van Dyck, the predominating influence in his later work. In spite of the demand for portraits, he continued to paint landscapes. In 1761 he sent a portrait of Earl Nugent to the Society of Artists, and in the following year the first notice of his work appeared in the London press. Throughout the 1760s he exhibited regularly in London and in 1768 was elected a foundation member of the Royal Academy. Characteristically he never took much part in the deliberations. After Gainsborough moved to Bath, he had less time for landscape and worked a good deal from memory, often drawing by candlelight from little model landscapes set up in his studio. About 1760 Peter Paul Rubens supplanted the Dutch painters as Gainsborough's chief love. This is particularly noticeable in Peasants Returning from Market, with its rich color and beautiful creamy pastel shades. The influence of Rubens is also apparent in The Harvest Wagon in the fluency of the drawing and the scale of the great beech trees so different from the stubby oaks of Suffolk. The idyllic scene is a perfect blend of the real and the ideal. The group in the cart is based on Rubens' Descent from the Cross (1611-14) in Antwerp cathedral, which Gainsborough copied. In Bath, Gainsborough had to satisfy a more sophisticated clientele and adopted a more formal and elegant portrait style based largely on a study of Van Dyck at Wilton, where he made a free copy of Van Dyck's painting of the Pembroke family. By 1769, when he painted Isabella Countess of Sefton, it is easy to see the refining influence of Van Dyck in the dignified simplicity of the design and the subtle muted coloring. One of Gainsborough's most famous pictures, The Blue Boy, was probably painted in 1770. In painting this subject in Van Dyck dress, he was following an 18th-century fashion in painting, as well as doing homage to his hero. The influence of Van Dyck is most clearly seen in the more official portraits. John, 4th Duke of Argyll in his splendid robes is composed in the grand manner, and Augustus John, Third Earl of Bristol rivals Reynolds' portraits of the kind. Gainsborough preferred to paint his friends rather than public figures, and a group of portraits of the 1760s — Uvedale Price, Sir William St. Quinton, and Thomas Coward, all oldish men of strong character — illustrate Gainsborough's sense of humour and his individual approach to sympathetic sitters. |
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In 1774 Gainsborough moved to London and settled in part of Schomberg House
in Pall Mall. Fairly soon he began to be noticed by the royal family and
partly because of his informality and Tory politics was preferred by George
III above the official court painter, Sir
Joshua Reynolds. In 1781 he was commissioned to paint the King and Queen.
Gainsborough continued his landscape work. The Watering Place was described by Horace Walpole, the English man of letters, as in the style of Rubens, but it also has much of the classic calm of Claude Lorrain, whose etchings Gainsborough owned. In 1783 he made an expedition to the Lake District to see for himself the wild scenery extolled by the devotees of the picturesque. On his return he painted a number of mountain scenes that have analogies with the work of Gaspard Dughet, whose works were widely distributed in English country houses. Some sea pieces dating from the 1780s show a new kind of realism, harking back to the Dutch seascape tradition. During his last years Gainsborough was haunted by his nostalgia for Arcadia in the English countryside and painted a series of pictures of peasant life more ideal than real, for example, The Cottage Door. But one of the latest landscapes, The Market Cart, is less idealized and more true to nature and looks forward to Constable in its treatment of the light breaking through the massive foliage. Gainsborough was the only important English portrait painter to devote much time to landscape drawing. He composed a great many drawings in a variety of mediums including chalk, pen and wash, and watercolor, some of them varnished. He was always eager to find new papers and new techniques. He produced a magic lantern to give striking lighting effects; the box is still in the Victoria and Albert Museum, together with some of the slides. In addition Gainsborough made a series of soft-ground etchings and aquatints. He never sold his drawings and, although many of them are closely related to pictures, they are not studies in the ordinary sense but works of art in their own right. Gainsborough was not methodical in keeping sitter books, and comparatively few of the portraits in the early years in London are dated. In 1777 he exhibited at the Royal Academy the well-known Mrs. Graham, C.F. Abel, William Henry, Duke of Gloucester, and Maria, Duchess of Gloucester, all deliberately glamorous and painted in richly heightened color. Queen Charlotte is more restrained; the painting of the flounced white dress decorated with ribbons and laces makes her look every inch a queen. It is significant that Gainsborough, unlike most of his contemporaries, did not generally use drapery painters. In 1784 he quarreled with the Academy because they insisted on hanging The Three Eldest Princesses at the normal height from the floor, which Gainsborough maintained was too high to appreciate his lightness of touch and delicate penciling. In protest he withdrew the pictures he had intended for the exhibition and never showed again at the Academy. In some of Gainsborough's later portraits of women, he dispensed with precise finish, and, without sacrificing the likeness, he concentrated on the general effect. Mrs. Sheridan melts into the landscape, while Lady Bate Dudley, a symphony in blue and green, is an insubstantial form, almost an abstract. Mrs. Siddons, on the other hand, shows that Gainsborough could still paint a splendid objective study. Few of the later male portraits are of a pronounced character, but exceptions are two particularly good pictures of musicians, Johann Christian Fischer and the unfinished Lord Abingdon. A new venture in 1783 was The Mall in St. James' Park, a park scene described by Horace Walpole as all a flutter like a lady's fan. The Morning Walk, with romanticized figures strolling in a landscape, is painted in the same spirit. The fancy pictures painted in the 1780s gave Gainsborough particular pleasure. They are full-sized, idealized portraits of country children and peasants painted from models — for example, The Cottage Girl with a Bowl of Milk. The idea appeared in immature form in the little rustic Suffolk figures, and he may have been fired to exploit it further by seeing Murillo's Saint John, which he copied. Of all the 18th-century English painters, Thomas Gainsborough was the most inventive and original, always prepared to experiment with new ideas and techniques, and yet he complained of his contemporary Sir Joshua Reynolds, Damn him, how various he is. Gainsborough alone among the great portrait painters of the era also devoted serious attention to landscapes. Unlike Reynolds, he was no great believer in an academic tradition and laughed at the fashion for history painting; an instinctive painter, he delighted in the poetry of paint. In his racy letters Gainsborough shows a warm-hearted and generous character and an independent mind. His comments on his own work and methods, as well as on some of the old masters, are very revealing and throw considerable light on contemporary views of art. |
| — Gainsborough,
painter of portraits, landscapes, and fancy pictures, was one of the most
individual geniuses in British art. He was born at Sudbury, Soffolk, and
went to London in about 1740, probably studying with the French engraver
Gravelot. He returned to Sudbury in 1748 and in 1752 he set up as a portrait
painter at Ipswitch. His work at this time consisted mainly of heads and
half-length, but he also painted some small portrait groups in landscape
settings which are the most lyrical of all English conversation pieces (Heneage
Lloyd and his Sister). His patrons were the merchants of the town and
the neighboring squires, but when in 1759 he moved to Bath, his new sitters
were members of Society, and he developed a free and elegant mode of painting
seen at its most characteristic in full-length portraits (Mary, Countess
Howe, 1764). In 1768 he was elected a
foundation member of the Royal Academy, and in 1774 he moved permanently
to London. Here he further developed the personal style he had evolved at
Bath, working with light and rapid brush-strokes and delicate and evanescent
colors. He became a favorite painter of the Royal Family, even though his
rival Reynolds was appointed King's Principal Painter. Gainsborough sometimes said that while portraiture was his profession landscape painting was his pleasure, and he continued to paint landscapes long after he had left a country neighborhood. He produced many landscape drawings, some in pencil, some in charcoal and chalk, and he occasionally made drawings which he varnished. He also, in later years, painted fancy pictures of pastoral subjects (Peasant Girl Gathering Sticks, 1782). Gainsborough's style had diverse sources. His early works show the influence of French engraving and of Dutch landscape painting; at Bath his change of portrait style owed much to a close study of van Dyck (his admiration is most clear in The Blue Boy, 1770, 118x122cm); and in his later landscapes (The Watering Place, 1777, 147x180cm) he is sometimes influenced by Rubens. But he was an independent and original genius, able to assimilate to his own ends what he learnt from others, and he relied always mainly on his own resources. With the exception of his nephew Gainsborough Dupont, he had no assistants and unlike most of his contemporaries he never employed a drapery painter. He was in many ways the antithesis of Reynolds. Whereas Reynolds was sober-minded and the complete professional, Gainsborough (even though his output was prodigious) was much more easy-going and often overdue with his commissions, writing that ‘painting and punctuality mix like oil and vinegar'. Although he was an entertaining letter-writer, Gainsborough, unlike Reynolds, had no interest in literary or historical themes, his great passion outside painting being music (his friend William Jackson the composer wrote that he ‘avoided the company of literary men, who were his aversion... he detested reading'). Gainsborough and Reynolds had great mutual respect, however; Gainsborough asked for Reynolds to visit him on his deathbed, and Reynolds paid posthumous tribute to his rival in his Fourteenth Discourse. Recognizing the fluid brilliance of his brushwork, Reynolds praised ‘his manner of forming all the parts of a picture together', and wrote of ‘all those odd scratches and marks’ that ‘by a kind of magic, at a certain distance... seem to drop into their proper places'. ^ — Thomas Gainsborough was a landscape and portrait painter, one of the great English masters. He was born in Sudbury, Suffolk in the family of a clothier. He showed an aptitude for drawing early and first was encouraged by his mother, who was a woman of well-cultivated mind and excelled in flower-painting. He used to spend a lot of time outdoors, drawing. In 1740, at the age of 13 he was sent to London to study art. He spent several years working in the studios of different artists, one of whom was Hubert Gravelot, a draughtsman and engraver, another one was a scene-painter and illustrator Francis Hayman. In 1748 Gainsborough presented The Charterhouse (1748) to the Foundling Hospital, it was a way for the artist to show one of his works, because at that time there were no other possibilities for young artists. In 1746 Gainsborough married Margaret Burr, an illegitimate daughter of Duke of Beaufort. His wife brought the family an annuity of £200, which enabled him to start his career as a portrait-painter in Ipswich. He first did not have many commissions there and had a lot of time to indulge in his favorite pursuit: to draw landscapes. Also he created many beautiful pictures of his wife and daughters such as Self-Portrait with His Wife, Margaret (probably) (1747), Thomas Gainsborough, with His Wife and Elder Daughter, Mary, (1752), The Painter's Daughters, Margaret and Mary, Chasing Butterfly, (1756), The Painter's Daughters, Margaret and Mary, Holding a Cat, (1759). The most notable portraits of that period are Robert Andrews and His Wife Frances (1749), Heneage Lloyd and His Sister (1755), William Wollaston. (1759). |
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In 1760 Gainsborough decided to move to Bath, where it was possible for
him to have portraits commissioned by the much wealthier and nobler persons.
Bath, famous for its mineral waters, was the principal lounging place for
persons of wealth and leisure in winter. Gainsborough became well-known
there in his first year after moving and since then always had a lot of
sitters. His portraits combine the elegance of Van
Dyck with his own characteristic informality. There are such early masterpieces
as Mrs.
Philip Thicknesse (1760), Mary,
Countess Howe (1764), The
Blue Boy (exhibited R.A. 1770), and the landscape The
Harvest Wagon (exhibited S.A. 1767). In 1768 he became one of the
foundation members of the Royal Academy, at which he exhibited annually
until 1784, when he retired after the disagreement over the hanging of his
pictures at the exhibition. In 1774 Gainsborough moved to London. He was an established master by then. To this last great period of his life belong such masterpieces of portraiture as The Hon. Mrs. Thomas Graham (exhibited R.A. 1777), The Hon. Frances Duncombe (1778), Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, née Elizabeth Linley (1785), William Hallett and His Wife Elizabeth, née Stephen, aka The Morning Walk (1785), Mrs. Sarah Siddons (1785), and landscapes The Watering Place (1777), The Cottage Door (exhibited R.A. 1780). Mountain Landscape with Peasants Crossing a Bridge (1784), The Woodsman (1788). He died from cancer. ^ — LINKS — Self-Portrait = Self-Portrait (1787) — The Artist with his Wife and Daughter (1748, 92x70cm) _ also the dog, drinking from a puddle. — Johann~Christian Bach — Haymaker and Sleeping Girl — Girl With Pigs > — Georgina, Duchess of Devonshire (1783) _ Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire [1757-1806], wife of William, 5th Duke of Devonshire, was not only the leader of London's high society, but one of the most popular figures that English social life has ever produced. She was a friend of the Prince of Wales (later George IV) [his 1782 portrait by Gainsborough] and of Charles James Fox, for whose election in 1784 she campaigned. — Mr. and Mrs. Andrews = Mr and Mrs Andrews (1748, 70x119cm) _ Robert Andrews and his wife Frances Mary, née Carter, were married in 1748, not long before Gainsborough painted their portraits — and that of Auberies, their farm near Sudbury. The church in the background is St. Peter's, Sudbury, and the tower to the left is that of Lavenham church. The small full-length portrait in an open-air rustic setting is typical of Gainsborough's early works, painted in his native Suffolk after his return from London; the identifiable view is unusual, and may have been specified by the patrons. We must not imagine that they sat together under a tree while Gainsborough set up his easel among the sheaves of corn; their costumes were most likely painted from dressed-up artist's mannequins, which may account for their doll-like appearance, and the landscape would have been studied separately. This kind of picture, commissioned by people 'who lived in rooms which were neat but not spacious', in Ellis Waterhouse's happy phrase about Gainsborough's contemporary Arthur Devis, was a speciality of painters who were not 'out of the top drawer'. The sitters, or their mannequin stand-ins, are posed in 'genteel attitudes' derived from manuals of manners. The nonchalant Mr. Andrews, fortunate possessor of a game licence, has his gun under his arm; Mrs. Andrews, ramrod straight and neatly composed, may have been meant to hold a book, or, it has been suggested, a bird which her husband has shot. In the event, a reserved space left in her lap has not been filled in with any identifiable object. Out of these conventional ingredients Gainsborough has composed the most tartly lyrical picture in the history of art. Mr. Andrews's satisfaction in his well-kept farmlands is as nothing to the intensity of the painter's feeling for the gold and green of fields and copses, the supple curves of fertile land meeting the stately clouds. The figures stand out brittle against that glorious yet ordered bounty. But how marvellously the acid blue hooped skirt is deployed, almost, but not quite, rhyming with the curved bench back, the pointy silk shoes in sly communion with the bench feet, while Mr. Andrews's substantial shoes converse with tree roots. (The faithful gun dog had better watch out for his unshod paws.) More rhymes and assonances link the lines of gun, thighs, dog, calf, coat; a coat tail answers the hanging ribbon of a sun hat; something jaunty in the husband's tricorn catches the corner of his wife's eye. Deep affection and naive artifice combine to create the earliest successful depiction of a truly English idyll. — The Blue Boy = The Blue Boy (1770, 178x112cm) portrays Jonathan Buttall, the son of a successful hardware merchant, who was a close friend of the artist. The work was executed during Gainsborough's extended stay in Bath before he finally settled in London in 1774. The artist has dressed the young man in a costume dating from about 140 years before the portrait was painted. This type of costume was familiar through the portraits of the great Flemish painter, Anthony van Dyck [1559-1641], who was resident in England during the early 17th century. Gainsborough greatly admired the work of Van Dyck and seems to have conceived The Blue Boy as an act of homage to that master. — Upland Landscape with Figures, Riders and Cattle (1787, 21x30cm) — Landscape with Country Carts (1785, 128x103cm) — Eleazar Davy of the Grove, Yoxford, Suffolk (1775, 74x61cm) — Major General Sir William Draper (1765, 127x102cm) — Samuel Kilderbee (1757, 125x100cm) — Mrs. Fitzherbert (1784, 76x64cm) — Cottage Girl with Dog and Pitcher (1785, 174x125cm) — Shepherd Boys with Dogs Fighting (1783, 224x168cm) _ The top dog's boy is stopping the other boy from hitting it with a stick. — George, Lord Vernon (1767, 246x150cm) _ pawed by his friendly dog. — John and Henry Trueman Villebois (1783, 195x155cm) _ making a house of cards. — King George III (1781, 239x159cm) _ Barrel-shaped George III [1738 – 29 Jan 1820] was the first of the House of Hanover to command general respect on becoming king of Great Britain, and at the outset he conciliated all classes of his subjects. In 1761 he married Charlotte Sophia, princess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. During the administration of George III's favorite prime minister, Lord North, the American colonies, protesting England's attempts at taxation, proclaimed, on the 04 July 1776, and, eventually, achieved their independence. The peace treaty was signed in February 1783. George III welcomed the union between Ireland and Great Britain, but refused the proposed Catholic emancipation, which led to the resignation of William Pitt in 1801. In 1810, his favorite child, Princess Amelia, fell dangerously ill; this caused an attack of mental derangement, not the first he had had. In 1811, his eldest son George, Prince of Wales (later George IV) was appointed regent. George III was hopelessly insane until his death; he also lost his sight. His ailment is now believed to have been caused by porphyria. — The Artist's Daughters with a Cat (1761, 76x63cm) _ This unfinished picture was painted soon after the artist arrived in Bath. — Carl Friedrich Abel (1777, 223x147cm) _ Carl Friedrich Abel [1725-1787] was a German-born and trained musician and composer, who came to London in 1759 and pursued a successful career in England. For some time he shared a house with Johann Christian Bach; in 1775 they opened their own concert hall in Hanover Square. Abel was a close friend of Gainsborough. In the painting, Abel is seated at a table writing music, while a cello is leaning on his left knee. Abel's dog, lying under the table at its owner's feet, was again portrayed by Gainsborough in Pomeranian Bitch and Pup (1777). — John Plampin (1755, 50x60cm) _ Plampin [1727-1805] was a local landowner. A dog is interested in whatever it is that he is holding in his left hand. He holds his right hand inside his jacket, in a manner that would be typical of Napoleon (stomach ulcer?) — The Marsham Children (1787, 243x182cm) _ In the rococo period all over Europe Watteau stood as symbol of a new gracefulness and ease: the proof that the painter can tackle apparently flippant subject-matter and yet be a great artist. Watteau's own attitude was soon to matter no longer; he represented something which he might not always have wished to be. His compositions exercised an influence which was perhaps sometimes hardly conscious. A Frenchified grace in genre subjects was attempted everywhere, even in England. The most personal response to Watteau is in Gainsborough, a great painter who yet seldom painted anything resembling a Watteau subject. Several of Gainsborough's early portraits show him utilizing Watteau's compositions for his sitters. But Gainsborough borrows more than a pose, as his later pictures confirm. It is freedom that exhales from his portraits: the freedom of nature and natural settings is allied to free handling, and the whole expresses the idiosyncratic character of his sitters, so relaxed and yet lively, just like Gainsborough's own nature. The painter who described himself in a letter to a patron as `but a wild goose at best' was dearly Watteau's cousin, taking the same freedom for the artist as he expressed in his art, and conscious of being the odd man out in ordinary society. Gainsborough, if anyone, was the heir to Watteau's art, but he was not to torn to the 'fancy picture' until late in life; and there would have been little patronage for an English painter producing fêtes galantes in preference to portraits. — Master John Heathcote (1770, 127x101cm) — Conversation in a Park (1740, 73x68cm) _ This charming picture belongs to Gainsborough's early period, when he was working in London and Suffolk. The theme of the conversation in a park evokes Watteau and his school; it denotes a French influence, which played a considerable part in the formation of the artist — he was in fact a pupil of the French engraver Gravelot at the St Martins Lane Academy. This picture has been thought to represent Thomas Sandby and his wife. At the Watson sale in 1832, it was described as depicting the artist and his wife. The painter's marriage took place in 1746; a very similar work, Mr and Mrs Andrews, is dated 1748. The open-air portrait is a familiar theme in the English school, whereas in eighteenth-century France the portrait is usually in an interior. The evocation of nature by the English portrait painters is on the whole conventional; it is quite another matter with Gainsborough, however, who has treated the landscape for its own sake. |
| — Mr
and Mrs William Hallett ('The Morning Walk') (1785, 236x179cm) _ Instinctive,
unpompous, drawn to music and the theatre more than to literature or history,
and to nature more than to anything, Gainsborough continues to enchant us,
as the serious Reynolds seldom can. Suffolk-born, like Constable, he also
became, within his means and times, a 'natural painter' — albeit of
a very different kind. Although he said he wished nothing more than 'to
take my Viol de Gamba and walk off to some sweet Village where I can paint
Landskips', his feeling for nature encompassed much more than landscape.
Children and animals, women and men, everything that dances, shimmers, breathes,
whispers or sings, look natural in Gainsborough's enchanted world, so that
'nature' comes to encompass silks and gauzes, ostrich feathers and powdered
hair as much as woods and ponds and butterflies. But this rapturous manner
of painting, in which all parts of a canvas were worked on together with
a flickering brush, only appears in mature works, such as this famous and
splendid picture. In his early years in Sudbury, after his training in London
restoring Dutch landscapes and working with a French engraver, Gainsborough's
finish was less free. After moving to the resort town of Bath in about 1759,
he found a metropolitan clientele, and discovered Van Dyck in country-house
collections. Both were to be decisive, and the effects are best judged in
his portraits of women sitters, on the scale of life, in which elegance
and ease of manner combine with a new, more tender color range and a loosening
of paint texture. In 1774 he moved permanently to London, where he built
up a great portrait practice, but also began to paint imaginative 'fancy
pictures' inspired by Murillo. He never aspired to 'history painting' in
the Grand Manner. His poetry resides mainly in his brush, not in compositional
inventiveness. It was surely Gainsborough's own inclination, however, to
interpret a formal marriage portrait, for which the sitters probably sat
separately, as a parkland promenade. William Hallett was 21 and his wife
Elizabeth, née Stephen, 20 when they solemnly linked arms to walk in step
together through life. A Spitz dog paces at their side, right foot forward
like theirs, as pale and fluffy as Mrs Hallet is pale and gauzy. Being only
a dog with no sense of occasion he pants joyfully hoping for attention.
The parkland is a painted backdrop, like those of Victorian photographers,
yet it provides a pretext for depicting urban sitters in urban finery as
if in the dappled light of a world fresh with dew. — Johann Christian Fischer (1780, 229x151cm) _ Johann Christian Fischer was an outstanding musician. He was born in 1733 in Germany at Freiburg-im-Breisgau and played for a time in the court band at Dresden before entering the service of Frederick the Great. On coming to London, where he is first recorded on 2 June 1768, he became a member of Queen Charlotte's Band and played regularly at court. His performance of Handel's fourth oboe concerto during the Handel Commemoration at Westminster Abbey in 1784 gave particular pleasure to George III. Regardless of such successes, he failed in 1786 to secure the post of Master of the King's Band. He collapsed in 1800 while playing in a concert at court and died shortly afterwards (29 April 1800). Fischer was a composer and virtuoso oboist. His two-keyed oboe is visible on the harpsichord-cum-piano against which the musician leans. Fanny Burney praised the 'sweet-flowing, melting celestial notes of Fischer's hautboy,' but the Italian violinist Felice de' Giardini [1716-1793] referred to Fischer's 'impudence of tone as no other instrument could contend with.' In the portrait on the chair behind Fischer is a violin, on which he was apparently also an accomplished performer although only in private. The harpsichord-cum-piano, made by Joseph Merlin who came to London from the Netherlands in 1760 and established a successful business in the production of pianofortes, presumably refers to his abilities as a composer, as no doubt do the piles of musical scores. This portrait of Johann Christian Fischer stands as testimony to Gainsborough's own love of music. The artist preferred the company of actors, artists, dramatists and musicians to that of politicians, writers or scholars, and was himself a talented amateur musician in addition to being a painter. Gainsborough once wrote to William Jackson: 'I'm sick of Portraits and wish very much to take my Viol da Gamba and walk off to some sweet Village when I can paint Landskips and enjoy the fag End of Life in quietness and ease.' Yet some of his finest portraits are of musicians and include, in addition to that of Fischer, the composers Karl Friedrich Abel and Johann Christian Bach (1776). These two portraits date from the late 1770s, whereas that of Johann Christian Fischer was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1780. Gainsborough seems to have known Fischer while he was still living in Bath (Fischer moved permanently to London in 1774). As early as 1775 Fischer evinced an interest in the artist's elder daughter Mary [1748-1826], whom he married at St Ann's Church, Soho, on 21 February 1780. The wedding was agreed to reluctantly by Gainsborough, who, although he admired Fischer as a musician, perhaps hoped that his elder daughter might make a better marriage, and lodged doubts about the musician's character. He wrote to his sister on 23 February 1780: 'I can't say I have any reason to doubt the man's honesty or goodness of heart, as I never heard anyone speak anything amiss of him; and as to his oddities and temper, she must learn to like as she likes his person, for nothing can be altered now. I pray God she may be happy with him and have her health.' The marriage did not last and Mary gradually became insane. Whatever tensions Gainsborough might have been experiencing with regard to Fischer's relationship with his daughter, Gainsborough's portrait is masterly in its compositional sophistication, use of color and sympathetic characterization. It is clear, however, that the likeness has been painted over another portrait which will no doubt be revealed by X-ray. The portrait came into the Royal Collection indirectly. It appears to have been painted for Willoughby Bertie, 4th Earl of Abingdon [–1799], a radical politician and a talented amateur musician, but was sold by his successor. Eventually it was acquired by Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, who in 1809 presented it to his brother, the Prince of Wales (later George IV). Both were admirers of Gainsborough's work. |
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