Gainsborough in London Susan Sloman
The Suffolk painter is best known for his rural scenes – but his last years in the capital were the pinnacle of his career.
The writer Captain Philip Thicknesse said of his friend Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) that, ‘though he is a shy man, he knows he is one of the first geniuses in Europe’.
This remark was made in 1773. It is striking because, at that time, the artist had never travelled abroad and did not even live in the English capital.
Between 1759 and 1774, he worked in Bath, perfecting a distinctive style of painting and establishing a network of influential friends and clients.
His move to London in 1774 earned him the right to be called one of the great figures of the 18th century. Today, our ideas about the English countryside are informed by his landscapes. Our concept of what men and women of the Georgian period looked like is, to a significant degree, founded on Gainsborough’s portraits.
Having shared his house in Bath with his milliner sister, Mary Gibbon, he was unusually sensitive to changing tastes in fashion and understood better than most artists the properties of fabrics and the way garments were cut and constructed.
Gainsborough in London looks at the last phase of the painter’s life. In London, Gainsborough became increasingly independent-minded. This affected what he painted, and how he painted. He was more inclined than ever to experiment and to leave parts of his canvas roughly finished or apparently unfinished.
‘Neglect’, a word sometimes used to define sprezzatura, or studied carelessness, was recognised to be a hallmark of Gainsborough’s style.
When he moved permanently to London in 1774 and settled in Schomberg House, in Pall Mall, Gainsborough was no stranger to the capital.
More than three decades earlier, at the age of 13, he had left Sudbury, his birthplace in Suffolk, to study there.
At that time, he attended a drawing academy, founded by William Hogarth in St Martin’s Lane in 1734. The Frenchman Hubert-françois Gravelot taught Gainsborough drawing.
The influence of Gravelot’s elegant
draughtsmanship remained with him for life, but it was Hogarth’s towering artistic personality that provided the real impetus to his career.
In the spring of 1788, he became seriously ill. Sometime between mid-February and mid-april, Gainsborough spent a day at the trial of Warren Hastings, Governor-general of Bengal, in Westminster Hall. There he sat with his back to an open window and returned home chilled and unwell. It was a turning point that signalled his decline.
The artist died of cancer on 2nd August 1788 at 2am, in the rear second-floor bedroom of 87 Pall Mall. William Pearce, who lived in Pall Mall and had become a close friend of Gainsborough’s in recent years, is the only person outside the family known to have been present.
He afterwards corrected the myth about Gainsborough’s final words, which William Jackson published as ‘We are all going to Heaven, and Van Dyke is of the party.’ Pearce’s pithier version was ‘Van Dyke was right.’ Gainsborough’s daughter Margaret told the landscape painter James Ward that he said simply, ‘Van Dyke.’
A small funeral was held at St Anne’s, Kew, on 9th August. Among the pall-bearers were the artists Joshua Reynolds, Benjamin West, Samuel Cotes and Paul Sandby. Gainsborough’s grave was outdoors, covered by a plain, dark blue stone slab, laid flat on the ground and inscribed:
On 10th December 1788, after the annual prize-giving at the Royal Academy, Reynolds delivered his 14th and penultimate Discourse to students. This, as a tribute to a single artist, was unprecedented in form, and Reynolds was uncharacteristically emotional as he spoke.
‘His praises of Mr Gainsborough,’ we are told, ‘were interrupted by his tears.’
Gainsborough in London by Susan Sloman is published on 23rd March (Yale University Press, £35)