Gainsborough Part 2

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE VII.--MRS. ROBINSON--"Perdita"]

Gainsborough left two daughters, whose portraits he painted several times. The elder one, Margaret, did not marry; while the younger, Mary, was secretly wedded in 1780 to her father's friend, Johann Christian Fischer, the hautboy player. This marriage caused Gainsborough much trouble; he foresaw that the musician's irritability and eccentric behaviour on many occasions could not conduce to the happiness of his daughter; however, to quote his own letter to his sister, Mrs. Gibbon, "As it was too late for me to alter anything without being the cause of total unhappiness on both sides, my _consent_, which was a mere compliment to affect to ask, I needs must give." The father's foreboding was only too fully justified; the union turned out very unhappy from the first, and within a year or so husband and wife separated. Both sisters were mentally deficient, and their aberrations increased with age to the point of total derangement. Mary, soon after her marriage, became subject to wild hallucinations, "perhaps the most reasonable" (as Fulcher puts it) being that the Prince of Wales was pursuing her with his love. After her mother's death she went to live with her sister, whose mental condition was even worse than her own; they would receive no visitors who did not belong to the n.o.bility, so that many who wished to gain admittance to the house were obliged to a.s.sume t.i.tles which they did not possess. Margaret died about 1824, and Mary a year or two later; before her death she insisted on presenting to the king the portrait of Fischer, painted by her father at Bath about forty years before; this portrait is now in the Royal Collection.

Of Gainsborough's personality and character much has no doubt been gathered from the preceding pages. His physical appearance is familiar from his own portraits of himself, and from that which Zoffany painted of him. He was handsome, tall and strong, with large features and a broad if not very high forehead; the small eyes are quick and observant, the mouth sensitive and rather undecided. In the choice of his friends he attached little importance to breeding and none to social position; he was generous and open-handed to all, with money to his relations and often indiscriminately with his works to friends or mere acquaintances: on one occasion he gave his picture of the "Boy at the Stile" to Colonel Hamilton (equally well known at the time as an amateur violinist and a gentleman pugilist) for having played him a solo on the violin; to Wilts.h.i.+re, the carrier who took his pictures from Bath to London, and who refused to take payment in money from the artist, he presented many valuable landscapes.

Intellectually he was extremely gifted; although his education in his youth was much neglected his letters show him to have been by no means ignorant or uncultivated. They also bear the impress of his spontaneous wit and keen humour; of this quality there is evidence in numerous anecdotes. An old man of the labouring cla.s.s, named Fowler, used to sit to him at Bath; on the studio mantelpiece stood a child's skull, the gift of a medical friend.

"Fowler, without moving his position, continually peered at it askance, with inquisitive eye. 'Ah! Master Fowler,' said the painter, 'that is a mighty curiosity.' 'What might it be, sir, if I may make so bold?' 'A whale's eye,' was the grave reply. 'No, no, never say so, Muster Gainsborough. Sir, it is a little child's skull!' 'You have hit it,'

said the wag. 'Why, Fowler, you're a witch! But what will you say when I tell you it is the skull of Julius Caesar when he was a little boy!'

'Laws!' cried Fowler, 'what a phenomenon!'"

Gainsborough's temper was very hasty, quite opposed to the patient courtliness of Reynolds. When a certain peer or alderman, posing, with boundless self-satisfaction, for his portrait, begged the artist not to overlook the dimple in his chin, "d.a.m.n the dimple in your chin, I will paint neither the one nor the other!" was the uncompromising rejoinder.

These stories, unimportant as they are, serve to give an insight into the man's character; but whatever his personal faults and qualities may or may not have been it is with his works that posterity is chiefly concerned, and by them and them alone that Gainsborough must be judged.

IV

GAINSBOROUGH'S WORKS

The works of Gainsborough may be divided into three chronological groups, just as his life was divided between three distinct localities.

But whereas there is a definite and fundamental difference between the pictures painted at Ipswich and those of the remainder of his life, there is not to any similar extent a determined demarkation between his productions at Bath and those of his last and most glorious years in London.

It has been seen that Gainsborough used palette and brush from at least the age of fourteen, when he went to London to study with Hayman. But the productions of this very early period are extremely difficult to identify. The National Gallery of Ireland possesses two drawings in pencil, portraits of a man and a woman, on each of which appears the signature _Tho: Gainsborough fecit 1743-1744_. These, the earliest extant attempts of Gainsborough in portraiture are hard and laboured in execution, but the heads are well-modelled and full of character; they must have been done in London before his return to his native Sudbury.

A similar hardness and elaborate care and attention to detail characterises the early landscapes painted in Suffolk. The only pictures of the old masters to which the young artist could have had access at this period were landscapes of Dutch painters such as Ruysdael, Hobbema, and Wynants. Their influence is obvious in his own early productions, especially that of Wynants; the most important work of this character is the large landscape belonging to Mr. J. D. Cobbold of Ipswich; it is an elaborate composition, semi-cla.s.sical in style, with conventional hills in the distance, and a carefully put in group of cattle and figures in the foreground. This is the sort of thing that Thicknesse must have found in the painter's studio upon his first visit, together with the portrait of Admiral Vernon (now in the National Portrait Gallery), and others which the Governor describes as "truly drawn, perfectly like, but stiffly painted and worse coloured."

The "Landguard Fort" was commissioned by Thicknesse shortly after the artist's marriage and removal to Ipswich, and must therefore have been painted between 1747 and 1750; it thus establishes an important landmark in the painter's early years, and although the original is unfortunately lost, it is possible from the engraving of it, which still exists, to approximately date other early landscapes of Gainsborough. To about the same time probably belongs the "View in Suffolk" of the Irish National Gallery, while the "Cornard Wood" in the National Gallery, somewhat more free in execution, is slightly later.

Of the portraits of this period very few can be traced, and it is probable that no large number were painted. The "Admiral Vernon" has already been mentioned and also the "Miss Hippisley" (Sir Edward Tennant's collection), and the heads of the artist's daughters at South Kensington. There are also in existence two half-length ovals of Mr.

Robert Edgar and Miss Katherine Edgar, the latter probably one of the best examples of Gainsborough's later years in Suffolk. They all show the same characteristic tightness, and a lack of that marvellous freedom for which his later works are so remarkable.

PLATE VIII.--MISS HAVERFIELD

(At the Wallace Collection)

Portraits of children by Gainsborough are not frequent, although he introduced country boys and la.s.ses into his landscapes with the greatest success. This example in the Wallace Collection possesses a charm which makes one regret that his youthful sitters were not more numerous.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PLATE VIII.--MISS HAVERFIELD]

Almost directly after his settlement at Bath the artist's manner changed very appreciably. This was probably due chiefly to the fact that he was able in the neighbourhood of Bath to see and study the works of great masters of the past, and notably the great family group by Van Dyck at Wilton House. He no doubt also had access to the fine array of works by Rubens then hanging at Blenheim and unfortunately now dispersed. The paintings of these masters seem to have disclosed to Gainsborough the possibilities of his materials, and from this moment his artistic development is rapid and decided, much more rapid than is generally believed. Most people imagine that all his best works date from the years of his life in London after 1774, and that the pictures of his Bath period, previous to that year, are comparatively much inferior. This is quite a mistake, for many of his most famous works were in fact painted at Bath and his genius had reached its full maturity long before he settled in Pall Mall. The fine half-length of Miss Linley and her brother, belonging to Lord Sackville at Knole, Lord Burton's "Lady Suss.e.x and Lady Barbara Yelverton," the large equestrian portrait of General Honywood, several portraits of Garrick, such landscapes as those belonging to Lord Tweedmouth, Lord Bateman, and Mr.

Lionel Phillipps were all painted at Bath, as was probably also the immortal "Blue Boy" itself.

One of the first of Gainsborough's sitters after his arrival at Bath was Mr. Robert Craggs Nugent, afterwards Viscount Clare and Earl Nugent, whose full-length portrait was the first picture ever sent by the artist to a public exhibition. It was shown at the Spring Garden Exhibition of the Society of Artists of Great Britain in 1761 and now belongs to Sir George Nugent. In the following year a picture entered in the Society's catalogue as "A whole-length portrait of a gentleman with a gun," has been identified as the picture, now at Althorp, of William Poyntz, brother of Georgiana, the first Countess Spencer, herself the mother of that more famous Georgiana, d.u.c.h.ess of Devons.h.i.+re. Both the mother and the daughter were painted about the same time, the latter as a little girl of five or six years of age.

These two pictures of the usual half-length size are also at Althorp.

Year by year Gainsborough continued sending portraits and landscapes to the Society's exhibitions, the huge canvas of General Honywood on horseback hanging there in 1765; the next year came, among others, the full-length portrait of Garrick leaning against a bust of Shakespeare, painted for the Town Hall, Stratford-on-Avon, where it still hangs.

In 1769 the Royal Academy opened its first exhibition; Gainsborough was represented by four pictures, including a whole-length portrait of Isabella, Lady Molyneux, afterwards Countess of Sefton, and another of George Pitt, first Lord Rivers. In 1770 we find six pictures and a book of drawings, in the following year five full-lengths and two landscapes, and in 1772 no less than fourteen pictures, four of which were portraits, and ten "drawings in imitation of oil-painting;" these latter, of which a few exist, are curious productions drawn in water-colour on thick coa.r.s.e paper laid down on canvas and then varnished; the process is not a very happy one, and the artist's fancy for it does not appear to have been lasting.

For the four following years Gainsborough's name is absent from the Academy catalogues from the cause already mentioned of a disagreement with Reynolds as recorded by Walpole. But during this time Gainsborough no doubt continued to turn out "heads" in great numbers, and not a few full-lengths, to say nothing of landscapes of varying size and importance. Several of these half-lengths are in the National Portrait Gallery and the National Gallery, while a considerable number are to be found in private collections.

Sir Walter Armstrong, in his monumental work on Gainsborough,[1] puts forward very forcibly the theory that the famous "Blue Boy" at Grosvenor House was painted about the year 1770 at Bath and not in 1779 in London, as has been generally supposed. It is impossible to reproduce here his closely reasoned arguments, but his conclusion is most probably correct that the "Blue Boy" is a masterpiece of Gainsborough's "Bath period." It is a portrait of a certain Jonathan b.u.t.tall, a very wealthy ironmonger who lived at the corner of King Street and Greek Street, Soho. He is represented at full-length, standing in a landscape, in a rich blue "Van Dyck" costume, holding a large hat with a white feather in his right hand. The history of the picture and the manner of its coming into the possession of the Duke of Westminster are uncertain; it may have been sold together with the effects of Jonathan b.u.t.tall, senior, after the death of his widow in 1796, when all his property was disposed of by public auction. It seems to have belonged to Hoppner, who died in 1810, and who probably is the author of the very good copy of the "Blue Boy" which is now in America, and has sometimes been looked upon as a replica from the master's own hand.

To this same period in the artist's career probably belongs another and almost equally famous picture which hangs on the same walls as the "Blue Boy." The Duke of Westminster's "Cottage Door," one of the finest of Gainsborough's landscapes or pastoral scenes, appears to have been a product of the last years spent at Bath, together with the great "Watering Place" at the National Gallery; the "Rustic Children"

belonging to Lord Carnarvon and of which a small version is also in the National collection; Mr. G. L. Ba.s.set's "Cottage Girl," and many other landscapes of equal or lesser importance.

It is therefore fair to surmise that had Gainsborough never made his last move from Bath to London the world's stock of artistic treasures would in all probability not have been very much the poorer. That he did afterwards create works of greater beauty was presumably not the effect of his settlement in the metropolis, but merely of the continuance of the natural development of his genius; to the very end of his career he continued to profit by the lessons of greater experience; his touch constantly grew more free, more feathery, his pigment more transparent, his insight into character more rapid and more sure. The increased elegance and heightened refinement of his later portraits may or may not be due to a closer touch with the court and its immediate surroundings; but, from what has gone before, it is clear that it is a delusion to speak deprecatingly of a "Gainsborough of the Bath period."

It is by no means easy to a.s.sign dates to most of the pictures painted by Gainsborough in London. The Academy catalogues provide but slight a.s.sistance; for one thing portraits were almost invariably unnamed in those days and can only be identified in most cases by the help of contemporary criticism or correspondence; besides, as we have seen, Gainsborough's first reappearance at the official exhibition took place in 1777 with the portraits of the Duke and d.u.c.h.ess of c.u.mberland, and his final quarrel with the inst.i.tution was only a few years later. But the beautiful women and men of fas.h.i.+on who sat to him were legion.

Portraits such as that of "Mrs. Robinson" in the Wallace Collection, "Mrs. Siddons" in the National Gallery, "The Hon. Mrs. Graham" in the Scottish National Gallery are too well known and too easily accessible to need description. Many, however, of his greatest works are hidden away from the general public in private collections, and only reveal themselves now and again when their owners consent to lend them to an exhibition.

Among these is Lord Rothschild's "The Morning Walk," which may perhaps be looked upon as Gainsborough's most perfect masterpiece. It is a portrait group of Squire Hallett and his wife walking in a landscape with a white Pomeranian dog. As in many of the master's finest achievements the colour-scheme is of the soberest description; like the "Lady Mulgrave" or Lord Normanton's marvellous "Lady Mendip" it is almost a monochrome. Yet, by a sort of magic, such pictures as these give the impression of a superb melody of colour; every touch conduces to a most perfect harmony, and the effect is obtained by a method so personal, so entirely new to his time, that Reynolds, speaking of him in one of his discourses, was able to say that "his handling, the manner of leaving the colours, ... had very much the appearance of the work of an artist who had never learned from others the usual and regular practice belonging to his art."

And indeed a survey of Gainsborough's life-work leads one to agree with the words of Sir Joshua, but in a wider sense than the President intended them to apply. Gainsborough owed little or nothing to the great masters of painting who came before him, and less to any of his contemporaries. His teachers were Nature and his own sympathy with his subject. Nowhere in the work of his maturity is there to be found any trace of imitation of the Dutch or of the Italian masters. He did not pose his models _a la_ Van Dyck, nor did he borrow his palette from t.i.tian; he is the most English of English artists as he is the greatest glory of English art. "He is an immortal painter," says Ruskin, "and his excellence is based on principles of art long acknowledged and facts of Nature universally apparent."

[Footnote 1: Pages 121, 124.]