Eighteenth Century British Portraiture

(via The Outline of Art) William Orpen writes:

The Art Of Gainsborough, Romney, Raeburn, Hoppner, And Lawrence

1

Shortly before little Joshua Reynolds celebrated his fourth birthday in the West of England, there was born in the Eastern Counties a babe destined to become his greatest rival in life and death. Thomas Gainsborough was born in 1727 at Sudbury, in Suffolk. He was one of a large family, his father being a wool manufacturer and clothier of moderate means, while his mother was a woman of education, the sister of a schoolmaster and herself a skillful painter of flowers. Thomas inherited his mother’s love of nature and her talent for art, and spend his boyhood rambling about the countryside and sketching the scenery round Sudbery. His gift for catching a likeness revealed itself early. One day, having seen a man robbing an orchard, he made a quick sketch of him, with the result that the robber was recognized from Gainsborough’s drawing and arrested. The boy’s faculty for copying, however, was not always exercised in the interests of law and order; and on another occasion, when he desired to play truant, he forged his father’s handwriting in a letter to the schoolmaster, asking for a day’s holiday. The ruse succeeded, but was subsequently found out, and seeing clearly that the boy would work at nothing but his drawing and sketching, the father wisely sent his son at the age of fifteen to London to study art under the French engraver Henri Gravelot. Young Gainsborough also studied at the St Martin’s Lane Academy, and later became the pupil of the portrait-painter Francis Hayman (1708-76), with whom he continued nearly four years. In 1745 he returned to his native town of Sudbury, where he began practice as a portrait painter and occasionally painted a small landscape for his own pleasure.

Unlike Reynolds, who was ‘wedded to his art,’ Gainsborough married when he was only nineteen. He fell in love with Margaret Burr, a beautiful girl of eighteen, who fortunately possessed an income of £200 a year of her own, and as no obstacles were raised to their wedding the boy-and-girl couple settled down at Ipswich, where Gainsborough soon acquired a considerable local reputation as a portrait painter. Here his two daughters were born and the painter led a happy domestic life, sketching in the country between the intervals of his professional portraiture and spending his evenings playing the violin—for he was devoted to music—either in his own home or in the houses of some of his friends.

In 1760 he was tempted to leave this simple life at Ipswich and moved to Bath, a fashionable center to which everyone who was anyone in London society came sooner of later. From a professional point of view this move was the beginning of Gainsborough’s fortune, for the fashionable world soon flocked to the studio of this ‘new man’ who made his sitters look so august and distinguished, and the modest provincial, who had begun painting three quarter lengths at five guineas apiece, now asked eight guineas, and was soon able to increase his figure to something nearer London prices. But while his fortune waxed, his happiness waned, and having now secured the entry into the fashionable world, Gainsborough began to pay attention to other ladies and so excite his wife’s jealousy. His home life was no longer simple or happy, and as time went on his private troubles increased, for both Mrs Gainsborough and his two daughters became subject to mental derangement. To the world, however, he continued to show a cheerful face, and his sprightly conversation and humor made Gainsborough a welcome favorite in all society.

In time the fame of the Bath painter spread to London, where Gainsborough occasionally exhibited at the Society of Artists, but though in 1768 he was chosen as one of the foundation members of the Royal Academy, he did not immediately leave Bath. He came there when he was thirty three; and it was not till he was forty seven that he was persuaded to move to London. In 1774 he took a part of Schomberg House in Pall Mall, and his success was immediate. ‘The King sent for him and Duchesses besieged his studio.’ Society was rent in twain, divided into a Reynold faction and a Gainsborough faction, and under these circumstances it is not altogether surprising that Sir Joshua’s jealousy did not allow him to be quite fair to his rival, whose power of securing a likeness he once formally denied.

Many stories are told of the rivalry between the two painters, and they have mostly increased with the telling in the course of years. As an example of the growth of legends, we may cite the widely circulated story that Reynolds at an Academy banquet once proposed the health of ‘Mr Gainsborough, the landscape-painter of the day,’ whereupon Richard Wilson is said to have retorted, ‘Ay, and the greatest portrait-painter too.’

The original version of this incident is told by Thomas Wright in his Life of Richard Wilson, published in 1824, and here we learn that the dialogue took place, not at an Academy banquet, but a the Turk’s Head in Gerrard Street, shortly after Gainsborough had arrived in London from Bath. Meeting Richard Wilson there, Reynolds in a bantering spirit said, ‘Have you heard sir, that our greatest landscape-painter has come to town?’

‘Nay, Sir Joshua,’ retorted Wilson, ‘you mean our greatest portrait-painter.’ Thus what was originally a piece of good humored chaff between two great artists has been twisted by inaccurate repetition into a display of maliciousness on both sides.

Nevertheless it must be admitted that there was a decided coolness between Reynolds and Gainsborough, and this was natural enough, for not only were the two men competitors for the patronage of Society, they were also temperamentally too far apart to understand one another completely. ‘With Reynolds,’ Sir Walter Armstrong has said, ‘deliberation counted for much; Gainsborough’s good things are impromptus.’ The seriousness and slight pomposity of Reynolds could not mix easily with the free-and-easy gaiety of Gainsborough. To Gainsborough, Reynolds seemed something of a pedant; to Reynolds, Gainsborough appeared rather a frivolous person. For many years neither missed many opportunities of getting a ‘dig’ at the other.

Eighteenth Century British Portraiture (continued)