‘If ever this nation should produce genius sufficient to acquire
for us the honourable distinction of an English School, the name of
Gainsborough will be transmitted to posterity, in the history of the
art, among the very first of that rising name.’ So wrote, in his
Fourteenth Discourse, Sir Joshua Reynolds--a lover of pomp and ceremony
even in the art of Literature--doing therein ‘untimely justice’ to the
merits of his contemporary, whom he survived. Since then the English
School, whose separate existence this accomplished admirer of the
Roman and the Bolognese did but doubtfully and modestly look forward
to, has become an accomplished fact, and all but a hundred years after
his death, ‘the talents of the late Mr. Gainsborough’ are honoured at
the Grosvenor Gallery. In the two large rooms and in the vestibule
there are to-day exhibited about a couple of hundred pieces from his
brush; the great Sir Joshua Exhibition of last winter is felt to be
successfully rivalled; and an opportunity is given to the student to
perceive the range, the flexibility, the spontaneity of Gainsborough’s
art.
Gainsborough, like any other distinct individuality in Art or Letters,
is best understood when he is taken simply on his merits, without
reference to other personalities who happened to be of his time. To
institute a perpetual comparison between him and Sir Joshua is to
make the sterile blunder that is made when Dickens is pitted against
Thackeray, the epic of _Copperfield_ against the satire of _Vanity
Fair_. In each case it was only accident that brought the men into
juxtaposition; and as regards Gainsborough, it is rather with Velasquez
or Vandyke, or with some French Eighteenth Century Master of familiar
grace, that we should compare him. These were his kindred, with
these he had something in common, as the Romans, the Bolognese, and
sometimes the Venetians, were the kindred of Sir Joshua. And yet, to
a certain extent, comparison between Gainsborough and Sir Joshua is
even now unavoidable. Living at the same period and in the same great
town, painting the same people, and--save for the briefer apparition
of Romney--dividing between them, though dividing unequally, the
applause of polite Society, that choice which the men of their time
had to make of one of them, has still to a certain extent to be made
by us. Often, of course, we are liberated from the necessity of any
such narrow alternative; but when we look at the portraits, by the two
artists, of Johnson, Garrick, Mrs. Siddons, the characteristics of
each--what each lacked and what each brought to the accomplishment of
his task--cannot but suggest themselves. And it will then be apparent
that Reynolds painted with a more obvious learning, Gainsborough with a
more spontaneous grace; Reynolds often with a more determined adherence
to the particular character, Gainsborough with a keener enjoyment of
the suggestions that character afforded for translating a sometimes
uncouth nature into an exquisite art. Take, for instance, the two
portraits of Mrs. Siddons: the learning and tradition of the Schools,
the disposition towards a dignity that may be well-nigh pompous, are
in Sir Joshua’s ‘Tragic Muse’; the spontaneous grace, the disposition
towards simplicity are in the Mrs. Siddons of Gainsborough. Further,
again, to compare the portraits of Dr. Johnson by Sir Joshua with that
one by Gainsborough at the Grosvenor Gallery, is to see that here is
an instance in which the fidelity--the unflattering fidelity--is on
Reynolds’ side, and the idealisation on Gainsborough’s. Yet it is
hardly needful to declare of so great a man as Gainsborough that he
never idealised merely that he might flatter. He idealised because his
vision of the world was bound to be poetic. He was a poet above all
things. The ideal was his atmosphere. But Sir Joshua, with all his
accomplishments, lived with the prose of the world, and, as a rule, was
but in vain ambitious to reach to its poetry.
The poetic character of Gainsborough’s mind and work is, then, the
first thing to be realised, if we are to understand his pictures. For
otherwise we shall be offended at exaggerations and astonished at
suppressions, both of which are the result of a method he adopted in
obedience to his temperament, which combined, of course, a gentle and
genuine love of Nature with a consuming thirst to see that Nature was
never deprived of the assistance of Art. Gainsborough has been written
of as the earliest Master of Naturalism--save, indeed, Hogarth--in the
English School. Nor is the description untrue; in the sense that he
sought his inspiration from Nature, instead of from academies, and that
his landscape had more than a suggestion of Suffolk or of Somerset.
Yet Morland carried Naturalism much further than Gainsborough, and
Constable much further than Morland. Gainsborough was never a mere
copyist of Nature. From the first he composed and arranged, but his
artifices were seldom very apparent, and his control over actual
form--his artistic modification of it--was gentle and tempered, and
this is most of all made evident by the display of his Landscape. With
the permanent exhibition at the National Gallery and the annually
recurring winter shows at Burlington House, no one of course has any
need to be ignorant of the fact that one of the most fascinating of the
painters of portraits was also a landscape painter. But the display
at the Grosvenor Gallery will bring home to people a truth some may
have overlooked, because at the Grosvenor Gallery Gainsborough’s
range in landscape work is seen to have been extensive. No single
early painting there, indeed, can claim to be quite the equal of the
‘Great Cornard’ picture in Trafalgar Square, but the paintings are so
many, and the subjects so varied, that the impression they produce
must be great. In the East Room, the smaller room, are some of the
most interesting of these landscapes. There--to begin with only a
minor example--is the ‘Landscape with Figures against a Tree’: one of
the very few dated pictures. It is of the year 1775, or just about
the time that the painter left Bath for London. It is interesting
as seeming to belong to an earlier period, as carrying on to a time
when most of his work had changed character, the features of his more
youthful work. It is a bit of every day English scenery, accepted
for what it is, with a tolerance of the commonplace rare with him,
indeed in any day, but, as one would have thought, quite impossible to
his later life. Here, too, is one of his few failures to attain what
was really beautiful, ‘A Landscape with Cows,’ lent by the trustees
of the Duke of Newcastle--an artificial scene of blue distance and
of hot and ‘unconvincing’ foreground. ‘A View in Shropshire’ is in
character not less classical, not less suggestive of Claude, but it
is far more successful. The foreground is of wooded country, brown
and gold; behind it, a richly illuminated champaign ends abruptly in
a conical hill, which is the Wrekin beheld in the light of a selected
hour. The Catalogue of the Exhibition--full of industriously compiled
detail and of quaint anecdote, carefully burrowed for in half-forgotten
places--might, perhaps, have chronicled the fact that the great picture
we are speaking of is repeated, feature by feature, in another.
But this other happens to be hung so high that its merits we can
hardly estimate. Its pedigree, however, is unimpeachable. The little
‘Landscape with Horses Ploughing’ recalls, in the disposition of its
objects, Turner’s ‘Windmill and Lock,’ and Turner, who was never above
taking suggestions--who took them from every one--may possibly have
seen it. Lord Bateman’s ‘Boys and Fighting Dogs,’ though by no means
among the most attractive things, is at least memorable. It shares with
several other pictures the business of proving that as a draughtsman
of animals--certainly as a draughtsman of dogs--Gainsborough had few
rivals; and it is one of the rare instances of Gainsborough’s painting
what is properly called a subject picture--a picture in which the
portrayal of an incident has been the first care. Furthermore, the
boys here--like that uncouth child, ‘Jack Hill, in a Cottage’--are, at
all events, perfectly natural examples of everyday folk. Generally his
cottage urchins, though they have rustic grace and rustic wildness,
though they roll on the greensward and dabble in the brook, are not
profound studies of a real peasantry; and, though Leslie indeed said
of the ‘Girl with a Pitcher’ that nothing more beautiful had ever been
painted, we may remember that this lavish appreciation by a brother
artist who was invariably generous was bestowed at a time when the
graver aspects of the peasant’s life had, as far as pictorial art is
concerned, been mirrored only in the art of Turner. The student of
to-day, the student of Millet, can hardly single out for truthfulness,
though he can always single out for grace, the rustics of Gainsborough.
Into the realities of peasant life, Gainsborough scarcely even essayed
to have any deep entrance.
The large ‘View at the Mouth of the Thames’ is one of the most
realistic, one of the least poetic, of Gainsborough’s pictures. It is
an instance of how well this curiously flexible genius could at need
perform that which somebody else could still perform much better. And
if it had not to be remembered that Collins and Turner came after
Gainsborough, instead of before him, we should say the same about the
Duke of Westminster’s ‘Coast Scene.’ Here a sea that has only enough
of movement to give it vivacity and sparkle, runs up to a narrow
breadth of beach, behind which a cliff rises. Three figures are on the
beach--a group of country or of fisher folk; a man kneeling by a basket
hands up a fish, to be inspected by two girls, who bend towards him.
The inspiration of an ancient master and some concession to ancient
traditions are discernible in the umber and golden shores of another
piece. It is in the ‘River Scene with Cattle’ that Gainsborough is
more characteristic; it is there that he delights us in full measure
with that which is his own. The scene is at a ferry somewhere in the
Eastern Counties, where the stream is wide, the land large and flat,
the sky ample, the horizon infinite. At the edge of a miniature cliff,
stands a group of cattle. Below them are figures in shadow, and from
the water, to the right, rise high into the sky the tall and narrow
sails of two fishing-smacks drawn up together. Here the scene is an
everyday place, but Gainsborough has known how to choose the hour;
his selection of objects has been justified by a fortunate grouping;
he has secured a rhythm of line second only to that which lies at the
service of a subtle draughtsman of the figure or a great Ornamentist;
and the hues of silvery blue and golden grey with which his picture is
flooded, are those that gather only on the palette of a born colourist.
When this picture has been adequately seen, and its calm radiance
appreciated, the student has little need to go further to find what
Gainsborough was as a poetical recorder of earth and sky, and what as
a pure painter. But for variety’s sake, and for the sake of noting how
much Gainsborough saw for himself, and how much he was influenced,
too, by the ways in which predecessors as different from each other
as Hobbema and Cuyp had seen the world and presented it, it is well
to look carefully at some of the smaller landscapes in the other and
larger room. There are, perhaps, especially the ‘Small Landscape,’
with luminous white clouds, remote in a lofty sky; the ‘Forest Scene,’
and the unfinished sketch, in which Gainsborough has given to a little
group of gypsies and their beasts a greater dignity than a Fleming
could have bestowed on a Flight into Egypt. There are, of course,
larger works not claiming less attention; and one and all, by their
deficiencies as well as by their merits, show that the greatness or
the general attractiveness of Gainsborough as a landscape painter is
due not much to his naturalism--which was naturalism only in his own
day, and is seen to have been almost idealism in ours. His greatness as
a landscape painter consists much more in his continual endowment of
Nature with the grace and magic of Style.
* * * * *
In Portraiture, the only failing that can be laid to Gainsborough’s
charge--and it may at times be a serious one--is that he was apt to
be less impressed by individuality of character than by the occasion
which his subject presented for the painter’s triumph in brush-work.
Facile observer as he was, and wonderful draughtsman, it was not often
that he braced himself to such an effort of stern realism as was made
in the portrait of ‘Judge Skinner.’ This light of the law, sitting
robed--with the keen, sagacious face perfectly dominant over all the
splendour of attire--was painted (on the canvas of which we are now
speaking) for Christ Church, Oxford, of which in 1742 he had been a
student; but the Grosvenor Gallery contains another, though a less
admirable, presentment of the same person. This, though inferior, comes
likewise from an unimpeachable quarter--it is lent by the Honourable
Society of Lincoln’s Inn. Of portraits of William Pitt, there are
several by Gainsborough; but his best representation of all, of the
young man who governed England, is that which comes, like the second
portrait of Skinner, from Lincoln’s Inn. The natural charm of the
model here accorded with that which was the frequent preoccupation of
Gainsborough’s art, and sincere must have been the painter’s pleasure
in dealing with a face which--like the face of Dickens in his youth,
two generations later--expressed sweetness with firmness, and placidity
with boundlessness of resource. The portrait of ‘David Garrick’ is less
satisfactory as an effort of craftsmanship. The shrewd little lady
who succeeded the great and genial Peg Woffington in Garrick’s love,
declared that it was the ‘best portrait ever painted of her Davy,’ so
we will not attempt to dispute the excellence of the likeness; but the
thought that inspired the composition was comparatively trivial and
commonplace. In a park-like scene, the background somewhat suggestive
of Garrick’s favourite retreat at Hampton, the actor whose attentions
were wont to be divided between the Tragic and the Comic Muse--as Sir
Joshua has expressed so suggestively in his happy allegory--stands by
a pedestal on which is placed the bust of Shakespeare, and Garrick
has his arm round the bust, and almost familiarly caresses it. More
valuable would have been a picture in which the head of the actor had
been more dominant than the _dégagé_ gesture. The head of Garrick,
however, if the story goes truly, was always a puzzle to Gainsborough.
Of Garrick and of Foote--mobile comedians, baffling beyond all men--he
is said to have exclaimed, when he essayed to paint them, ‘Rot them for
a couple of rogues, they have everybody’s faces but their own.’
Generally, it may be noted, the full-lengths of men--sometimes, also,
the full-lengths of women--are less attractive than the half-lengths
and the busts, though whatever could be done by any artist to
overcome the difficulty of making the full-length interesting, could
be done by Gainsborough, since he was a master of draperies, and
skilled, as a pupil of Gravelot’s should have been, in the secrets of
dignified and gracious carriage. But, to remain for the moment with
the men’s portraits, one’s admiration of the elegance and harmony of
Tenducci’s portrait must be in excess of any feeling that can rightly
be prompted by the ‘Garrick.’ This, again, is the portrait of an
artist--Gainsborough’s sympathies were with artists--and Tenducci is
said to have ‘warbled so divinely.’ And then, to take an instance from
the women’s portraits, and to single out a full-length figure, in which
the face is modelled with exceptional exactness, and is one, too, of
peculiar refinement, take the portrait of Lady Sheffield, with her
aquiline nose and her almond-shaped eyes--even here the importance of
the countenance is a little effaced by the brilliant light on the showy
drapery of the skirt. No one could assert that, for real charm, that
picture--masterly as it is in its own kind--is equal to any one of half
a dozen busts or half-lengths in the same Gallery. But, on the other
hand, the ‘Sir Bate Dudley,’ ‘skilled in the nice conduct of a clouded
cane,’ is an instance of Gainsborough’s occasional triumph, even with
the full-length male figure; and the ‘Mrs. Graham,’ at Edinburgh, is
one of the most fascinating full-length portraits of a woman that has
been painted since the days of the Venetians. Furthermore, three more
quite masterly full-length male portraits are in the Grosvenor Gallery
itself: they are first, those that are lent by the Queen, the portrait
of Colonel St. Leger, the portrait of ‘Fischer’ the musician, and last,
the familiar ‘Blue Boy,’ a work directed possibly at the theories of
Sir Joshua and inspired by the practice of Van Dyck.
As one looks over the subjects of Gainsborough’s portraits, one
understands in part how it was that, comparing them with Sir Joshua’s,
or perhaps even with Romney’s, so few of them were engraved. Romney
was, above all things, seductive: he saw Lady Hamilton--or when
not Lady Hamilton, then some one who was almost equally pretty--in
everything, and the public liked what he saw. Sir Joshua was a
courtier, careful to be on the best of terms with the great world.
Gainsborough courted nobody, and the world talked much less about him.
Though, after the lapse of years, he succeeded in getting a hundred
guineas for a full-length picture, and moved, without imprudence, from
the cottage at Ipswich, rented at six pounds, first to the Circus at
Bath, and then to the west wing of Schomberg House, Pall Mall, he was
never really in his own time Sir Joshua’s rival in the public favour.
And much of his best work in Portraiture--over and above that work in
landscape which confessedly engaged his choice--was devoted to the
record of people of the artistic rather than the fashionable world;
people of professions the members of which were not in those days
motioned to the velvet of the social sward.
We have already spoken of more than one instance--and ‘Giardini,’
the fiddler, is another--of such a natural selection which governs
Gainsborough’s art. It is as characteristic of him in portraiture as
it is of Watteau in _genre_ pieces and gallant pastorals. But there
is a little canvas, the portrait of an unknown Mrs. Carr, which holds
its own either against portraits of people from the artistic world or
people from Georgian ‘Society.’ It is curiously natural and refined in
expression, exquisitely suggestive of elegant carriage, though so small
a portion of the figure is seen, and as a piece of flesh-painting, it
is unsurpassed by any of the more famous examples of Gainsborough’s
skill. Who was ‘Mrs. Carr’? And had Gainsborough, we may wonder, some
further interest in her than that which is aroused in any qualified
observer of Humanity by the vision of such agreeable beauty? For
Gainsborough, as a rule, painted best the models he knew the most.
Executing every touch with his own hand, and doing his most picturesque
with every model because he was so essentially artistic, he yet must
have undertaken many a portrait of fashionable persons or of enriched
_bourgeois_, into the dull recesses of whose character he did not
care to penetrate. Where he knew and liked, he painted with delight.
He was so profoundly impressionable: what he enjoyed stirred him: if
somebody played the fiddle particularly well, tears of rapture stood on
Gainsborough’s cheek.
His wife, who was in her youth a rose and brown coloured beauty,
and whose countenance was long afterwards lustrous enough under the
becoming grey of her powdered hair, Gainsborough painted several
times, and always with distinction and conspicuous artistry. His
handling of the subject is best in the portrait numbered 175--a
worthy companion to his own sensitive and high-bred countenance (No.
185). And his portraits of his daughters--his only children--are at
the least satisfying. One is a group--the two together; another is
a half-length of Mrs. Fischer; another, again, a half-length of the
brighter personality who remained ‘Miss Gainsborough.’ There is some
likeness between the two young women, in the general contour of the
head and in the fulness of the under-lip. ‘Miss Gainsborough,’ with
her clear brown eyes, delicate eyebrows, compact and intelligent
forehead, is the greater beauty; but to Mrs. Fischer there belongs a
winning expression of pathetic reverie. Both are felt to be the true
daughters of their father: the one by her possession of the gaiety and
fire of temper which characterised Gainsborough in his happiest times;
the other by her obvious inheritance of what proved more than her
share of Gainsborough’s keen perception of the sadness of so much of
human fortune. Sir Joshua Reynolds, who was almost wholly intellectual
and ‘practical,’ who lived on the outside of things, had nothing of
Gainsborough’s sense of profundity and pathos. And, in so far as he had
nothing of this, he was, in the essentials of character, the less of an
artist. For Goethe said--and when he said it he was uttering one of the
deepest of his truths--‘To be artistic is to be serious.’
(_The Standard_, 1st and 6th January 1885.)