Thomas Gainsborough

English painter

• Born: May 14, 1727
• Birthplace: Sudbury, Suffolk, England
• Died: August 2, 1788
• Place of death: London, England

Through his landscapes and portraits, Gainsborough became one of the most creative English painters of his age and an inspiration to many significant artists of the nineteenth century.

Early Life

Thomas Gainsborough (GAYNZ-buhr-oh) was born in a small Suffolk village, some 50 miles northeast of London. The exact date of his birth is unknown, but records show that he was baptized on May 14, 1727, at the local Independent Meeting House. Born into a large Dissenter family of nine children, Thomas was the fifth and youngest son.

Thomas’s father, John Gainsborough, was engaged in the wool trade. His mother, born Mary Burroughs, was a cultivated woman who enjoyed painting flowers and who encouraged her son’s artistic inclinations. The young Gainsborough attended the local grammar school run by his uncle, the Reverend Humphry Burroughs, but he displayed no significant academic ambitions and preferred to wander through the countryside with his sketchbook.

Convinced that Thomas’s artistic abilities showed sufficient promise, the Gainsboroughs sent their thirteen-year-old son to London in 1740, where he initially lived in the household of a respectable silver engraver. For a while he worked with the engraver and draftsman Hubert Gravelot, a Frenchman trained in the rococo style. He was also influenced by Francis Hayman, an English painter and engraver who dabbled in theatrical scenery. It was Hayman, with his rather dissolute reputation, who introduced Gainsborough to the more risqué aspects of London life, initiating his lifelong affinity for women and drink.

The young Gainsborough briefly attended an art school sponsored by William Hogarth, then England’s most famous living artist, but it remains uncertain whether the two ever met. Evidently, Gainsborough’s natural abilities enabled him to become self-supporting soon after his arrival in London. As his proficiency increased, art dealers hired him to repair old paintings, which afforded him the opportunity to study works by the old masters in detail. He was particularly attracted to the works of Dutch landscape painters such as Jacob van Ruisdael.

By 1745, the eighteen-year-old artist had his own fledgling business. He preoccupied himself with portraits and landscapes, a few of which sold for modest sums. Convivial, lively, and impulsive, Gainsborough showed no inclination to mingle with the elite of English society. Throughout his life, he preferred the companionship of musicians and theater people. He seldom read a book and generally avoided London’s active literary circles (although he became good friends with the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan), nor did he develop any significant political inclinations. Self-portraits from this period reveal a handsome young man, dignified without being pretentious.

On July 15, 1746, Gainsborough married Margaret Burr, an eighteen-year-old of great charm and beauty who was evidently the illegitimate daughter of the duke of Beaufort. The duke provided Margaret with an annual annuity of œ200, a handsome sum that provided the young couple with some financial security while Gainsborough struggled to become financially successful as an artist. His initial efforts to obtain lucrative commissions proved unsuccessful, and when his father died in the autumn of 1748, the young artist decided to return to his native Sudbury to help settle the family estate.

Life’s Work

Thomas Gainsborough’s productive career encompassed three basic phases. From 1748 through 1759, he remained a relatively obscure painter in Suffolk. After a few years in Sudbury, he moved his family, which by now included two daughters, to the nearby village of Ipswich. A thriving community of some eleven thousand, Ipswich boasted many citizens who had become wealthy in the wool trade. Gainsborough undoubtedly hoped that they and the local gentry would provide him with sufficient commissions to make a credible income.

Gainsborough had become convinced that portraiture was the only type of painting likely to lead to financial security, although his lifelong preference was for landscapes. He initially experimented with a format that depicted his clients amid a lush setting of English countryside. Although some eighty portraits of this Suffolk period have been identified, they did not bring him sufficient income to prevent his experiencing financial difficulties throughout much of the 1750’s.

Gainsborough led a fairly quiet and inconspicuous existence in Ipswich. His chief recreation consisted of long walks in the countryside to indulge his penchant for sketching and participation in a local society of musicians. Although it remains uncertain whether he learned to read music, he became an accomplished fiddler and evidently learned to play several other instruments.

One of the most influential friends Gainsborough made during this period was Philip Thicknesse, the governor of nearby Landguard Fort, who was one of the first to recognize the young painter’s gifts. At the urging of Thicknesse, Gainsborough sold his house and goods at Ipswich in 1759 and moved his family to Bath, thus beginning the second phase of his career. Bath was England’s most fashionable winter resort. Almost immediately, Gainsborough’s portraits attracted the attention of the fashionable and wealthy Englishmen who wintered in the town, and he quickly rose to become the most prominent artist in the area. Within seven years, he was living in luxurious quarters at the Circus, the city’s most prestigious address.

The growing success of Gainsborough’s portraiture increased his reputation in the capital. In 1761, he submitted a portrait for exhibition at the newly formed Society of Artists in London, and one of the works he sent the following year brought him his first significantly favorable attention in the London press. By 1768, his reputation was sufficiently established for him to be invited to become one of the thirty-six original members of the Royal Academy, the only non-London resident so honored. For the next several years, he regularly sent works to the academy’s annual exhibition, and by the time he finally decided to move to London in 1774, he was one of England’s most famous artists. The move to London inaugurated the third and most successful phase of Gainsborough’s career. He secured prestigious lodgings at Schomberg House, part of a ducal mansion on Pall Mall, one of the city’s most fashionable streets. By 1777, he had his own carriage and footman, signs of a highly advanced social status.

Soon after his arrival in London, Gainsborough was invited to the palace and became the favorite painter of the royal family. He produced eight portraits of George III and many others of the rest of the numerous members of the royal family. No courtier by nature, Gainsborough basically found his work at the palace tedious and seemed artistically inspired only by Queen Charlotte.

During these London years, Gainsborough’s only significant rival was Sir Joshua Reynolds, the first president of the Royal Academy. Contemporary newspapers and many subsequent works exaggerated the degree of their rivalry. Unlike Reynolds, Gainsborough never studied in Italy and was not enamored of the classical tradition that so dominated Reynolds’s style. Although competitors in the same market, the two recognized each other’s talent. In 1782, Reynolds even purchased Gainsborough’s Girl with Pigs (1782) for 100 guineas, 40 more than the original asking price.

Although his relationship with Reynolds remained gentlemanly, Gainsborough did quarrel repeatedly with the Royal Academy. Even after his election to the governing council in 1775, he never bothered to attend an academy meeting. The chief difficulty concerned the manner in which the academy chose to hang Gainsborough’s pictures at its annual exhibitions.

Gainsborough objected to some of the rigid rules regarding the placement of portraits and other works because he judged they did not always display his paintings in the best manner. He boycotted the exhibitions of 1773 through 1776, and in 1784 a final quarrel over the hanging of a portrait of three of King George’s daughters led Gainsborough to withdraw all of his works. He refused to exhibit with the academy for the rest of his life and instead opened his own public exhibition room at Schomberg House.

Although he enjoyed considerable financial success and public recognition during these years, Gainsborough’s home life was far from idyllic. His wife became increasingly demanding, and both of his daughters grew into unstable young women. Margaret, the elder, an eccentric, died unmarried in 1820; her younger sister, Mary, had a brief, unsuccessful marriage to a musician of whom her father disapproved and eventually became totally insane before her death in 1826.

During his final years, Gainsborough was able to command princely sums for his portraits: 40 guineas for a head, 80 for a half-length, and 160 for a full-length rendition. In contrast, his portraits from his Suffolk period had brought him only 8 to 15 guineas.

Gainsborough’s final illness began in the spring of 1788, when he noticed a lump on the back of his neck. Initially diagnosed as merely a swollen gland, it proved to be cancer. He continued painting almost to the end and had a final emotional farewell with Reynolds before dying at Schomberg House on August 2. Six of his fellow artists, including Reynolds, served as pallbearers. Four months afterward, Reynolds made Gainsborough the chief subject of his fourteenth discourse to the students at the academy, the only English artist he ever so honored.

Significance

Along with William Hogarth and Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough ranks as one of the giants of eighteenth century English painting. His lifetime output was prodigious, including more than seven hundred known portraits, between two hundred and three hundred landscape paintings, and numerous landscape drawings. His portraits, many of them clearly inspired by the style of Sir Anthony Van Dyck, provide posterity with an incredible panorama of personalities from the great age of English oligarchy. Figures as diverse as Samuel Johnson, Benjamin Franklin, Edmund Burke, and actorSarah Siddons all posed for the great master. When inspired by his subject, Gainsborough frequently achieved a remarkable degree of inventiveness and spontaneity in his portraits, especially in those of elegant women. Above all, he liked to incorporate his subjects within scenes from nature in a far less formalized manner than was the norm.

Although portraiture was the bulk of his work and was his chief source of income, Gainsborough’s persistent passion was landscape painting. His earlier works resembled the great Dutch masters in their precision. After his move to Bath, he developed a more fluid style similar to that of Peter Paul Rubens, whose work he greatly admired. Gainsborough’s landscapes did not copy nature directly but rather as it existed in his imagination. He frequently painted from little models of moss, pebbles, and even broccoli stalks that he meticulously constructed in his studio.

In his last years, Gainsborough experimented with a new genre of so-called fancy pictures. Whereas peasants had previously occupied only a small place in his landscapes, they now dominated the picture. These sentimental paintings, peopled with bucolic and often sad visages, reflected Gainsborough’s sincere concern with the plight of the poor. His glorification of the lower classes anticipated the work of Gustave Courbet some seventy years later.

Refusing to abide by any rigid rules, Gainsborough ranks as one of the most innovative artists of his age. In his later works, his brushwork became increasingly rough and indeterminate, clearly foreshadowing the Impressionists. He left no specific school of followers, his only known pupil being his nephew Gainsborough Dupont. In his love of the English countryside, however, he was clearly an inspiration for such nineteenth century painters as John Constable and Joseph Mallord William Turner. Above all, the hundreds of portraits that Gainsborough produced constitute a priceless historical record, opening a window into the aristocratic world of eighteenth century England.

Bibliography

Besley, Hugh. Thomas Gainsborough: A Country Life. New York: Prestel, 2002. Focuses on Gainsborough’s early life in Suffolk, where he indulged his passion for painting landscapes and developed a more natural approach to portraiture. Includes 80 reproductions of his paintings.

Gainsborough, Thomas. The Letters of Thomas Gainsborough. Edited by Mary Woodall. Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society, 1963. Definitive edition of Gainsborough’s correspondence, containing numerous examples of letters he wrote to his friends, family, and clients. These letters are carefully annotated. See also Woodall’s Gainsborough’s Landscape Drawings, published in London by Faber and Faber in 1939.

Hays, John. Gainsborough: Paintings and Drawings. London: Phaidon Press, 1975. Contains a brief biography and essay on Gainsborough’s style, coupled with helpful bibliographic information. Includes reproductions of 140 of his works, with comments on each, presented in chronological sequence to demonstrate his development as an artist.

Leonard, Jonathan Norton. The World of Gainsborough. Alexandria, Va.: Time-Life Books, 1969. This highly readable volume provides useful information on the life and style of Gainsborough and some of his leading contemporaries, such as Hogarth and Reynolds. It clearly describes the artistic environment in which these men flourished, including a section on eighteenth century Bath.

Lindsay, Jack. Thomas Gainsborough: His Life and Art. New York: Universe Books, 1980. A popular work that follows a standard chronological format in an easily understandable style. Lindsay, who has also written biographies of Hogarth and Turner, asserts that Gainsborough was the most creative English artist of his day.

Postle, Martin. Thomas Gainsborough. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002. An eighty-page illustrated introduction to the artist’s life and work.

Thicknesse, Philip. A Sketch of the Life and Paintings of Thomas Gainsborough, Esq. London, 1788. Written in only one day, this biography by Gainsborough’s longtime eccentric friend and benefactor is heavily anecdotal and self-serving. Yet it remains a highly useful source from a man who knew Gainsborough intimately for thirty-five years.

Vaughan, William. Gainsborough. New York: Thames & Hudson, 2002. Vaughan recounts Gainsborough’s life in relation to political and social movements in eighteenth century Britain. Includes 176 illustrations of Gainsborough’s art.

Waterhouse, Ellis. Gainsborough. London: Spring Books, 1958. The most important general study of the artist, written by a leading authority on the period. The book is lavishly illustrated and is especially useful for its thorough topical catalog of more than one thousand of Gainsborough’s works.

Whitley, William T. Thomas Gainsborough. London: John Murray, 1915. Long the standard biography, this work is based on years of research and incorporates much material from the newspapers of the era. The major focus of the volume is on Gainsborough’s life rather than his style.