Time the nation gave Gainsborough his due
Always considered second best to Constable and Turner, the painter is finally getting his due, says Mark Hudson
Maybe it’s the sound and feel of the name: important but at the same time a touch fussy and fusty, creakily old world in a way that makes me, for one, disinclined to rush out and shout, “I love Gainsborough.”
That Thomas Gainsborough is one of the mega-names of British art goes without saying: our greatest portraitist, the father of British landscape painting and probably the most technically adept painter this country has ever produced. But do we really revere him anything like as much as we should?
Gainsborough is currently having a moment: last month, £4.5 million of lottery money was awarded to turn the Gainsborough’s House museum in his home town of Sudbury, Suffolk, into a national centre for the study of his art, while major exhibitions are coming up at the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) and the Holburne Museum in Bath. Yet if Gainsborough’s ineffable swagger portraits – with big-haired, big-dressed beauties, rakish fops and formidable dowagers – define our ideas of 18thcentury elegance, and with it a kind of Britishness, they’re also divisive.
The news of that hefty grant had barely been announced on the Today programme on Radio 4, with two of the museum’s most notable supporters, fashion designer-turned-artist Nicole Farhi and her partner, playwright David Hare, pulled into a celebratory discussion, than the session turned twitchily defensive. The 18th century, Hare declared, is the most difficult period of British history for audiences to identify with, while Gainsborough himself is “our most neglected artist.”
Neglected might seem an odd word to use about an artist never out of lists of great British artists. Yet equally he is never fashionable, or he certainly hasn’t been over the past century.
Gainsborough is every bit the equal of Turner and Constable, but unlike them, he hasn’t been lucky enough to be recast as a great proto-modernist or endorsed as “revolutionary”. But Gainsborough, and his rival Joshua Reynolds, were radical in their own way: they redefined the British portrait, making it more glamorous and physically expansive, and drawing in a wider range of social types, not just landed aristocrats, but actresses, composers and artists, at a time when Britain was going through its most intense period of commercial and imperial expansion.
Certainly, the man himself was a far from establishment figure: seen in an early self-portrait that will appear at the NPG, he’s a handsome, but rather prickly looking East Anglian weaver’s son who looks possessed with the determination to take on the challenge of the great European masters.
Yet still we tend to look at one of Gainsborough’s powder-wigged portraits and consign him to a terrain of staid, unsexy heritage Britishness. He didn’t ask to be relegated to a world of cream teas and country houses. But that’s where he’s stuck.
I remember my first visit to Madrid’s Prado Gallery as an art student, being blown away by Velázquez and Goya, before I found myself in the small, little-visited British room on the top floor. I took one look at the tiredlooking portraits by Gainsborough, Reynolds and Co, and beat a hasty and horrified retreat: was that all Britain managed to contribute?
But I was unaware, in my blinkered, post-adolescent mindset, that my hero Goya and his European peers had looked on the classic English portrait not as stuffy and “conservative”, but as a model for a new kind of liberal, enlightenment-inspired representation.
I was finally “converted” to Gainsborough when I came across his portrait of Mary, Countess Howe in Kenwood House in Hampstead, north London, not long after graduating. The subject, a great 18th-century lady, couldn’t have been of less interest to me. But Mary’s serene features and Chinese-looking straw hat, which took up only a tiny proportion of the 8ft-high canvas, seemed simply the excuse for a rapturous essay in the sensuality of texture and colour. The pink of her silk dress, for example, with over-layering gauze apron and tumbling lace sleeves, was echoed in the threatening crimson in the smouldering sky overhead, in a painting in which every inch felt alive.
Gainsborough expressed a frustration at having to paint rich people – “those damned faces” – to make money, when what he really wanted to paint was landscapes. Yet fine though his landscapes often are, it is Gainsborough’s portraits that touch us most, whether of mega-aristocrats or exquisitely intimate studies of his wife and daughters. He was a fantastic recorder of family, as will be apparent from the Gainsborough’s Family Album exhibition at the NPG: not just of the physical development of his daughters, but of the pathos of time passing, reflected in his doting scrutiny.
His portrait of his wife Margaret in the Courtauld Gallery, indeed, is a marvellously tender and, above all respectful image of the wife he married when she was 18, as she approaches 50; so much so that it seems churlish to wish that he’d introduced just a hint of something darker and edgier.
But profundity can be found in Gainsborough, and perhaps where you’d least expect to find it. His portrait of Mr and Mrs Andrews, painted when he was 23, an apparently simple image of a landowner and his wife at ease in a quintessentially English landscape has become one of the most contested paintings in British art, provoking a multitude of interpretations. The Marxist critic John Berger famously described it as an embodiment of burgeoning 18th-century capitalism and patriarchal values in his 1972 book Ways of Seeing. And the attitude of Gainsborough himself to the couple remains elusive. The painting is far from fawning, certainly, but nor is the artist satirising or, still less, caricaturing them. Rather he’s looking into them with an ambitious 23-year-old’s dispassionate, but ruthless intentness.
And as to profundity, there is little in life up to and including birth, death and childbearing that is more profound than owning things. In this early masterpiece, the young Gainsborough understands that in a way that is reassuring and very slightly chilling. If it’s difficult to imagine that Gainsborough will become a buzz-figure in the remotely foreseeable future, it’s worth remembering that even 20 years ago, Constable was written off as “dentist’s waiting room art”, a stolid, conventional artist in the shadow of Turner. Now he is esteemed by many as a more honest and essentially deeper artist than his great rival. Gainsborough could be the subject of an equally radical reappraisal, and it could come a lot sooner than any of us would expect.
Gainsborough’s Family Album is at the National Portrait Gallery from Nov 22 to Feb 3
For too long, the artist has been stuck in a world of cream teas and country houses