Gainsborough, Thomas ( 1727-88 ) . English painter of portrayals, landscapes, and fancy images, one of the most single masterminds in British art.
He was born at Sudbury, Soffolk, and went to London in about 1740, likely analyzing with the Gallic engraver Gravelot. He returned to Sudbury in 1748 and in 1752 he set up as a portrayal painter at Ipswitch. His work at this clip consisted chiefly of caputs and half-length, but he besides painted some little portrayal groups in landscape scenes which are the most lyrical of all English conversation pieces ( Heneage Lloyd and his Sister, Fitzwilliam, Cambridge ) . His frequenters were the merchandisers of the town and the adjacent squires, but when in 1759 he moved to Bath, his new Sitters were members of Society, and he developed a free and elegant manner of painting seen at its most characteristic in full-length portrayals ( Mary, Countess Howe, Kenwood House, London, c.1763-64 ) .
In 1768 he was elected a foundation member of the Royal Academy, and in 1774 he moved for good to London. Here he farther developed the personal manner he had evolved at Bath, working with light and rapid brush-strokes and delicate and evanescent colourss. He became a favourite painter of the Royal Family, even though his challenger Reynolds was appointed King ‘s Principal Painter.
Gainsborough sometimes said that while portrayal was his profession landscape picture was his pleasance, and he continued to paint landscapes long after he had left a state vicinity. He produced many landscape drawings, some in pencil, some in wood coal and chalk, and he on occasion made drawings which he varnished. He besides, in ulterior old ages, painted fancy images of pastoral topics ( Peasant Girl Gathering Sticks, Manchester City Art Gallery, 1782 ) . Gainsborou
gh ‘s manner had diverse beginnings. His early plants show the influence of Gallic scratching and of Dutch landscape picture ; at Bath his alteration of portrayal manner owed much to a close survey of new wave Dyck ( his esteem is most clear in The Blue Boy, Huntingdon Art Gallery, San Marino, 1770 ) ; and in his ulterior landscapes ( The Watering Place, National Gallery, London, 1777 ) he is sometimes influenced by Rubens. But he was an independent and original mastermind, able to absorb to his ain terminals what he learnt from others, and he relied ever chiefly on his ain resources. With the exclusion of his nephew Gainsborough Dupont, he had no helpers and unlike most of his coevalss he ne’er employed a curtain painter.
He was in many ways the antithesis of Reynolds. Whereas Reynolds was sober-minded and the complete professional, Gainsborough ( even though his end product was colossal ) was much more easy-going and frequently delinquent with his committees, composing that `painting and punctuality mix like oil and acetum ‘ . Although he was an entertaining letter-writer, Gainsborough, unlike Reynolds, had no involvement in literary or historical subjects, his great passion outside painting being music ( his friend William Jackson the composer wrote that he `avoided the company of literary work forces, who were his antipathy… he detested reading ‘ ) . Gainsborough and Reynolds had great common regard, nevertheless ; Gainsborough asked for Reynolds to see him on his deathbed, and Reynolds paid posthumous testimonial to his challenger in his Fourteenth Discourse. Acknowledging the unstable glare of his brushwork, Reynolds praised `his mode of organizing all the parts of a image together ‘ , and wrote of `all those uneven abrasions and Markss ‘ that `by a sort of thaumaturgy, at a certain distance… seem to drop into their proper topographic points ‘ .
