Thomas Gainsborough
Thomas Gainsborough (Sudbury, baptized May 14, 1727 – London, August 2, 1788) was an English landscape and portrait painter.
He was an academic and one of the founders of the Royal Academy of Arts. His rivalry with sir Joshua Reynolds, the Academy's first president, is notorious.
Life and work
Suffolk
Thomas Gainsborough was born in Sudbury, Suffolk, a large county in eastern England. He was the youngest son of John Gainsborough, a weaver and woolen maker, and the sister of the Reverend Humphry Burroughs. At the age of thirteen he impressed his father with his pencil skills so that he was allowed to go to London to study art in 1740. In London he first trained with the French engraver Hubert François Gravelot but eventually became associated with William Hogarth and his school. He later studied painting with Francis Hayman, a painter of historical subjects. He assisted Hayman in decorating the upper boxes at Vauxhall Gardens, and contributed to the decoration of what is now the Thomas Coram Foundation for Children.
Through Gravelot, (who had been a disciple of the great French painter Antoine Watteau) he was influenced by him and, later, by artists of the Flemish school and by the Baroque painter Anthony van Dyck.
In 1746, Gainsborough married Margaret Burr, illegitimate daughter of Henry Scudamore, 3rd Duke of Beaufort, who established an annuity of two hundred pounds for the couple. The artist's work, at that time consisting mainly of landscape paintings, did not sell very well. He returned to Sudbury in 1748-1749 and concentrated on portrait painting.
In 1752, he and his family, which now included two daughters, moved to Ipswich. Commissions for personal portraits increased, but his clientele consisted mainly of local merchants and gentlemen. He had to borrow with his wife's annuity as collateral.
Bath
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Between 1759 and 1774 he lived in Bath, a fashionable seaside resort, where he painted numerous portraits (The Woman in Blue) and landscapes. In Bath she lived in The Circus 17. There, she studied van Dyck's portraits and was eventually able to attract a fashionable clientele. In 1761, he began submitting works to the exhibition of the Society of Arts in London (now the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, of which he was one of its first members); and from 1769 onwards he submitted works to the annual exhibitions of the Royal Academy. He selected portraits of well-known clients to attract attention. These exhibitions helped him gain a national reputation, and he was invited to become one of the founder members of the Royal Academy in 1769. His relationship with the academy, however, was not an easy one and he stopped exhibiting paintings by him there in the year 1773.
London
In 1774, Gainsborough and his family moved to London to live at Schomberg House, Pall Mall. In 1777, he again began exhibiting his paintings at the Royal Academy, including portraits of contemporary celebrities such as the Duke and the Duchess of Cumberland. Exhibitions of his continued to be held for the next six years.
In 1780, he painted the portraits of King George III and the Queen Consort, Charlotte Sofia. He later received many royal commissions. This gave him some influence in the Academy and allowed him to impose the way in which he wanted his work to be exhibited. However, in 1783, he took his paintings from the next exhibition and brought them to Schomberg House.
In 1784, royal painter Allan Ramsay died, and the king was forced to give the job to Gainsborough's rival and Academy president, Joshua Reynolds. Gainsborough nevertheless remained a favorite painter of the royal family. At his express wish, he was buried in St. Anne's Church, Kew, where the family regularly prayed.
In his later years, Gainsborough often painted relatively simple, ordinary landscapes. With Richard Wilson, he was one of the originators of the 18th century British landscape school .
He was the favorite painter of the British aristocracy and made a great fortune from his portraits. He died of cancer on 2 August 1788 in London, aged sixty-one, and is buried in St. Anne's Church, Kew, Surrey (located on Kew Green). He is buried next to Francis Bauer, the famous botanical illustrator. In 2011, an initiative was underway to pay for the restoration costs of his tomb.
Technique
Gainsborough was noted for the rapidity with which he applied his painting, working more from his observations of nature (and human nature) than from any application of academic rules. The poetic sensibility of his paintings caused Constable to say, "Looking at them, we find tears in our eyes and we don't know what causes them." He himself said, "I'm sick of portraits, and I can't wait to take my viol-da-gam and go to some sweet village, where I can paint landscapes and enjoy the last stretch of life in quiet and the facility". The resemblance of his landscapes is shown in the way he blended the figures in the portraits with the scenes behind them. His later work was characterized by a light palette and cheap, easy brushwork.
In one of his techniques, he would dip a sponge at the end of a stick into the watercolor to rub it on the paper without defining any shape. Later, when the work was finished, these spots took on recognizable shapes. Gainsborough called them "his scouring pads of him."
His most famous works, such as the Portrait of Mrs. Graham; Mary and Margaret: The Painter's Daughters; William Hallett and his wife Elizabeth née Stephen , known as The Morning Stroll ; and Cottage Girl with Dog and Jug, show the unique individuality of their protagonists.
Gainsborough's only known helper' it was his nephew, Gainsborough Dupont.In the last year of his life he collaborated with John Hoppner painting a full-length portrait of Charlotte, Countess of Talbot.
He produced more than 500 works, of which 230 are portraits. They are characterized by the noble and refined elegance of the figures, the poetic charm and the cold colours, mainly green and blue, with loose, thin and long brushstrokes.
His works are imbued with poetic melancholy, an effect achieved through very dim lighting, clearly reminiscent of Flemish landscapes of the 17th century that influenced you so much.
Many times he set the figures in his portraits outdoors; thus that of Mr. and Mrs. Andrews (c. 1750, National Gallery, London, England) shows the figures in a landscape and is one of the earliest examples of Gainsborough's ability to merge two genres. different creating a harmonious work.
The same is true of the Portrait of the Linley Sisters (1772, Dulwich Picture Gallery) in which the warm autumnal colors of the forest blend with the colors of the sisters' dresses in such a that the faces seem to emerge from the scene that surrounds them.
It has been claimed that this relationship between human beings and nature derives from the literary work of Henry Mackenzie, who describes the man of feelings, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who described a passionate love for nature and whose ideas would be fervently adopted and put into practice by romantic poets and painters. Gainsborough also painted landscapes without figures, mostly woods or open, rugged fields, including Cornard Woods (1748), The Watering Hole (c. 1777), and The Market Cart (1786), all of them in the National Gallery, London.
Other of his important portraits are Sara Buxton (1776-1777, Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid, Spain), The doctor Isaac Henrique Sequeira (Prado Museum, Madrid), The Baillie Family (1784), The Wife of William St Quentin (1767-1768), The Morning Walk (1785-1786) and Mrs. Siddons (1785), the latter in the National Gallery in London. There is also a famous portrait of Mrs. Siddons, Mrs. Siddons as Tragic Muse (1784) by Joshua Reynolds, Gainsborough's contemporary portraitist.
Also noteworthy are Perdita Robinson (1781, Wallace Collection, London), The Honorable Francis Duncombe (c. 1777, Frick Collection, New York), The Mrs Tenant (1786-1787, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), Countess Howe (Kenwood House, London) and many are in private collections, including The Blue Boy (c. 1779, Huntington Collection, San Marino, California, United States).
He also made numerous drawings and etchings. The artist also worked on lithophanes, a "projection" images through porcelain-coated wax screens through which light was filtered.
In fiction and music
- Kitty (1945) is a fictional film about Gainsborough, portrayed by Cecil Kellaway.
Gallery of selected works
Landscape in Suffolk (1748)
Authorport (1754)
The painter's daughters chasing a butterfly, (1756)
Two girls with a cat (h. 1759)
Sunset (1760)
The artist's daughters, Molly and Peggy (1760)
Portrait of the composer Carl Friedrich Abel with viola da gamba (h. 1765)
John Campbell, fourth Duke of Argyll (1767)
The chariot of the harvest (c. 1767)
Portrait of John Needham, 10th Viscount Kilmorey(h. 1768), Tate
River landscape (1768-1770)
The young blue (1770). The Huntington, California.
The woman of blue (h. 1770), Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg
The Linley sisters , (1772)
Portrait of the doctor Isaac Henrique Sequeira, c. 1775, Museo del Prado, Madrid.
Johann Christian Bach, (1776)
Gainsborough's daughter, Mary (1777)
The Honorable Richard Savage Nassau of Zuylestein, M.P.(h. 1778–80), oil on canvas, Detroit Institute of Arts
Colonel John Bullock (c. 1780)
His Grace Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (1783), National Gallery of Art
The harvest cart (h. 1784)
Portrait of George III of the United Kingdom in parliamentary robes (1785), Royal Castle of Warsaw
Mrs. Sarah Siddons (1785)
The Lady of Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1785–86)
Peasant with dog and jarro (1785)
Self-portrait (1787)
His Grace Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire(1787)
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