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Thomas Gainsborough

Thomas Gainsborough was one of the most fashionable and mature artists, portrait and landscape painters of 18th century Britain. Gainsborough was a self-taught painter.

Thomas Gainsborough didn’t specialize in seascape painting, historical and mythological painting, stilt life, battle piece, flower piece or genre painting.

He didn’t expose the dark sides of people’ life, he just revealed the person’s nature, interpreted the personality of a man.

Gainsborough was born in Sudbury, Suffolk, England. His father was a weaver involved with the wool trade. At the age of thirteen he impressed his father with his penciling skills so that he let him go to London to study art in 1740. In London he first trained under engraver Hubert Gravelot but eventually became associated with William Hogarth and his school. One of his mentors was Francis Hayman. In those years he contributed to the decoration of what is now the Thomas Coram Foundation for Children and the supper boxes at Vauxhall Gardens.

In the 1740's, Gainsborough married Margaret Burr, an illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Beaufort.

Gainsborough didn’t become famous overnight, he worked hard all his life.

The artist's work, then mainly composed of landscape paintings, was not selling very well. He returned to Sudbury in 1748-1749 and concentrated on the painting of portraits.

Gainsborough's early portraits are soft and delicate, often in the contemporary French manner with a touch of van Dyck.

In 1748 Gainsborough presented The Charterhouse (1748) to the Foundling Hospital

In 1752, he and his family, now including two daughters, moved to Ipswich.

Gainsborough was very fond of his two daughters and painted them frequently from childhood into their late twenties. Concerned for their future, he took care to ensure that they were well educated, sending them to an exclusive boarding school in Chelsea and tutoring them in drawing and landscape painting. A few years after this portrait was made, Mary entered into a disastrous marriage with the celebrated oboist, Johann Christian Fischer, an associate of her father. In later life she lived with her younger sister Margaret, although by then she suffered from severe mental illness.

In 1759, Gainsborough and his family moved to Bath. There, he studied portraits by van Dyck and was eventually able to attract a better-paying high society clientele. In 1761, he began to send work to the Society of Arts exhibition in London (now the Royal Society of Arts, of which he was one of the earliest members); and from 1769 on, he submitted works to the Royal Academy's annual exhibitions. He selected portraits of well-known or notorious clients in order to attract attention. The ceremonial portraits predominated that time. These exhibitions helped him acquire a national reputation, and he was invited to become one of the founding members of the Royal Academy in 1769.

In 1774 Gainsborough moved from Bath to London, and by 1777 he was well established, exhibiting portraits of members of the royal family at the Royal Academy. This full-length of the statuesque Mrs. Elliott—a Scottish lady of great beauty but easy virtue—was apparently commissioned by her lover, the first marquis of Cholmondeley, and was exhibited at the R.A. in 1778. Its accuracy, animation, pure, vivid, brilliant, intense, soft, delicate colours glorify facial expression of Mrs. Elliot and evoke infinite admiring of craftsmanship of Gainsborough.

Thomas Gainsborough's Mrs Richard Brinsley Sheridan is a portrait of a woman painted from nature. The sitter is Elizabeth Linley, an old friend of the artist, a singer, a beauty, and wife of the comic playwright Sheridan. But her social identity isn't the picture's focus.

Everything is natural. With loose hair, in loose natural clothing (no corsets or hip bolsters) she is seated on a bench of shrubby rock. Around her, there's a landscape that declares itself as free and uncultivated nature.

The woman sits under a softly bending tree whose leaves surround her head. Hair, leaves, cloth, grass, distant clump of sheep - nothing has a definite character. Everything is unintelligible and chaotic.

All is vague - and all is a blur. The way Gainsborough puts his paint on is designed to break down barriers. He fades the hair and the leaves at their edges, blends their textures, and softens all the physical differences between them.

In 1777, he again began to exhibit his paintings at the Royal Academy, including portraits of contemporary celebrities, such as the Duke and Duchess of Cumberland. Exhibitions of his work continued for the next six years.

The open-air portrait is a familiar theme in the English school, whereas in eighteenth-century France the portrait is usually in an interior. The evocation of nature by the English portrait painters is on the whole conventional; it is quite another matter with Gainsborough, however, who has treated the landscape for its own sake.

Full length portrait with gun-dog of the Hon. George Venables Vernon (1735-1830), later 2nd Lord Vernon. The sitter is leaning against a tree, stroking a spaniel. He was MP for Glamorgan in 1774 and succeeded to the title on his father's death in 1780.

In 1780, he painted the portraits of King George III and his Queen and afterwards received many royal commissions. This gave him some influence with the Academy and allowed him to dictate the manner in which he wished his work to be exhibited. However, in 1783, he removed his paintings from the forthcoming exhibition and transferred them to Schomberg House.

In 1784, royal painter Allan Ramsay died and the King was obliged to give the job to Gainsborough's rival and Academy president, Joshua Reynolds, however Gainsborough remained the Royal Family's favorite painter. At his own express wish, he was buried at Saint Anne's Church, Kew, where the Family regularly worshipped.

In his later years, Gainsborough often painted relatively simple, ordinary, crystal-clear, austere landscapes.

Gainsborough painted more from his observations of nature (and human nature) than from any application of formal academic rules. The poetic sensibility of his paintings caused Constable to say, "On looking at them, we find tears in our eyes and know not what brings them." He himself said, "I'm sick of portraits, and wish very much to take my viol-da-gam and walk off to some sweet village, where I can paint landskips (sic) and enjoy the fag end of life in quietness and ease."

Group portraits by Gainsborough are relatively rare. This is delineation of the London merchant James Baillie (1737-1793), with his wife Colin Campbell, and their four young children. Baillie's wife had been given the Christian name of her father Colin Campbell of Glenure. Although a formal portrait, Gainsborough conveys the sense of an affectionate family. The design of the picture is Mrs Baillie is seated roughly in the centre of the composition. Standing her youngest child on her knee she appears to be the fulcrum of family life. The range of colours convey expressiveness of their individual traits and immediacy of a child.

The Blue Boy (ca. 1770) is an oil painting by Thomas Gainsborough that now resides in the Huntington Library, San Marino, California. The painting itself is on a fairly large canvas for a portrait that measures 48 inches wide by 70 inches tall. Perhaps Gainsborough's most famous work, it is thought to be a portrait of Jonathan Buttall, the son of a wealthy hardware merchant. Gainsborough had originally painted something different on the canvas but then decided to paint the portrait of the blue boy over it. It is a historical costume study as well as a portrait: the suspect is the youth in his 17th-century apparel is regarded as Gainsborough's homage to Anthony Van Dyck, and in particular is very close to Van Dyck's portrait of Charles II as a boy. Subdued colours penetrate the composition.

It has been said that Gainsborough painted the portrait mainly to prove to his chief rival Joshua Reynolds that it was possible to use blue as the central color of a portrait, but this statement has been discredited: the rumor began circulating after Gainsborough's death and Reynolds had painted portraits in blue long before.

Gainsborough's only known assistant was his nephew, Gainsborough Dupont.

Gainsborough Dupont (1754-94) was the son of Gainsborough's sister, Sarah, and her husband, Philip Dupont, a carpenter in Sudbury. Since 1772 he was Gainsborough's pupil, after his formal apprenticeship was completed he remained with his uncle as a studio assistant. After the uncle's death, he pursued a career as a portrait painter and landscapist; his style was wholly influenced by his uncle's. Riot of colours, fluid brushstrokes were the most vivid features of his finished technique. He used secondary colours, semi-tones to show the message of the picture, it’s exequisite.He cought splashes of colours at his picture.

Thomas Gainsborough died of cancer on 2 August 1788 at the age of 61.He didn’t die forgotten and penniless, people remember him and admire his life-asserting art, combinations of colours and skills.

The list of literature

R.V. Shchipkova R.Z. Nazarova “English Conversation Practice Book”  for 3rd year student ,Saratov 1987

В.Д. Аракин “Практический курс английского языка ” 3 курс 2007

http://www.homeenglish.ru/