Suffolk’s great son
Huon Mallalieu applauds this portrait of the artist who defined the Georgian age
Biography Gainsborough James Hamilton (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25)
Gainsborough is James hamilton’s third biographical project, after Turner and Faraday, and, as with Turner, the task is made more difficult as so much correspondence and other documentary evidence was destroyed because of indecency. he rarely expressed it in paint, and then elegantly, but his letters are often really filthy, further support for a parallel made by hamilton: ‘With a personality that courted chaos, and a talent that drew out divine expression, he touches Wolfgang amadeus Mozart.’
Gainsborough came from a prosperous Suffolk family in and around Sudbury, but his father had rendered his branch poor relations by unfortunate speculations, in particular at the time of the South Sea Bubble. however, a legacy from an uncle enabled the boy to follow his inclination and train as an artist in london. his wit and charm, together with talent and application, set him on his way early and also won him a minor heiress, Margaret Burr, illegitimate daughter of a Duke of Beaufort, who had £200 a year settled on her.
Despite his drinking and whoring, which came near to killing him at least once, the marriage lasted and became a partnership that led to great prosperity. Margaret commandeered the proceeds from portrait painting, but he managed to keep from her what he got from his greater but less profitable love, landscape.
another distracting passion was music and Mr hamilton is very funny on Gainsborough’s entirely unjustified belief in his genius for it.
The lack of documents means that we know little of Gainsborough’s other women. although from time to time the author drops in a suggestive phrase, such as ‘but then Mary howe walked through his door’, there is no evidence that he had affairs with any of his sitters. Even the talented, beautiful and formidably seductive ann Ford ended up in the arms of his self-styled ‘patron’ Philip Thicknesse, rather than his.
Mr hamilton, a distinguished art historian, tells us that he will concentrate on Gainsborough’s society rather than his art, but, in fact, he does both vividly, rather as Charles Nickell did for Shakespeare in The Lodger.
The importance of Gainsborough’s Sudbury background among wool and cloth manufacturers is shown to be key to his mastery in painting fabrics and Mr hamilton is as wonderfully clear on painting tricks and techniques, such as ground glass in the pigment for added sparkle, as he is on brothels and bagnios. Gainsborough must have had strong sight to paint so mag- nificently in either semi-darkness or candlelight.
That there is a little too much repetition, and perhaps too many lists of sitters and their relationships, is again due to lack of documents, but the 18th-century art world is as well served here as the next century was in Mr hamilton’s A Strange Business: Making Art and Money in Nineteenth-century Britain.
a subsidiary hero is George III, not only a patron but a genuine friend. Did they ever, perhaps, touch on their distant kinship by marriage? Certainly, the King showed himself a true connoisseur of painting. The relationship between Gainsborough and Joshua reynolds is not so clear. Mr hamilton wavers between mutual admiration and dislike, but, in the end, as he says, reynolds visited his dying rival.
The index is a little confused. Too much ebullient background colour leads to occasional minor errors, such as Christie’s being prominent 20 years before its founding and the blokey conversational tone of ‘binge drinking’, ‘bangs on’, ‘get their acts together’ and the like will jar on some ears, but this is a valuable book, as enjoyable as Gainsborough’s company must have been.
Fiction Madame Zero Sarah Hall (Faber, £12.99)
Sarah hall’s electric new collection of short stories opens with Mrs Fox, the winner of the BBC National Short Story award, in which a newly pregnant suburban wife turns into a vixen. It compellingly exposes the part of the feminine that strains against domesticity, that which is ‘cut from the wild’.
This is also explored in the collection’s final story, Evie, in which a wife changes from the demure maker of her husband’s sandwiches to the demander of satisfaction for her newly liberated sexual appetite.
a fascination with metamorphosis is also felt in the places where the various stories are set, whether the edgeland of ‘the corona of the city’ for Mrs Fox or—more metaphysically—the mortuaries and hospitals that stud the collection. Thus death is summoned to the stories, where it lies uneasily beside a focus on birth and motherhood.
The author distils this at the close of Goodnight Nobody, when Jem brings her mother’s leftbehind lunchbox to the hospital mortuary: ‘She lifted the lid and smelled inside the box. Egg.’ The sulphurus reek of female fecundity permeates every page of the book.
Each story is itself an act of transformation, as Miss hall puts her reader inside the all too familiar—a suburban marriage, for instance, or a hospital or local swimming pool—and reveals the dizzying unknown beneath. reading them made me feel like Becca, the protagonist of Wilderness, who has stepped away from Whitby with its ‘lopsided abbey and sad little fishing fleet’ to venture across South africa’s ‘devilish’ Kaaimans viaduct: ‘all around and underneath the view rushed and wobbled. The atoms of things were going wrong. her eyes were flooding.’
Not for the faint-hearted, Madame Zero is a thrillingly vertiginous collection. Emily Rhodes
Gardens Secret Gardens of East Anglia Barbara Segall, photographs by Marcus Harpur (Frances Lincoln, £20)
GARDENS CAN definitely portray the particular characteristics of a certain part of the country, but it takes a certain skill to reveal this at the same time as telling the personal and horticultural stories of a loosely assembled group. In Secret Gardens of East Anglia, Barbara Segall grasps this elusive quality, celebrating the breezy openness of this often sparsely populated region as she reveals the delights of 22 gardens.
This is her home turf and she writes with confident affection about gardens that are clearly old friends. She also unveils a selection of lesser-known discoveries and one of the book’s chief pleasures is the diversity of gardens—both in size and style and the reflection of local variations within the four counties. At many, the seaside is never far away—to be expected, as it forms a great sweeping boundary stretching from the Thames to the Wash—but others are set in a wide range of countryside and one within the region’s academic jewel, the city of Cambridge.
It is, however, the book’s photographs that capture most tellingly the varied charm of East Anglian gardens and it is a source of great poignancy and sadness that Marcus Harpur recently lost his battle with cancer and didn’t live to see the book’s publication. As the photographs confirm, Marcus was a craftsman of both skill and vision.
The series of chapter openers are akin to a group of portraits, each capturing the essence and character of its subject. Throughout, the images demonstrate his eye for detail and composition and, although he would no doubt have had something to say to the publisher about some of the colour reproduction, the book is a fitting legacy that celebrates the part of England in which he lived all his life and which he loved deeply. George Plumptre
Lifestyle Cigars Nicholas Foulkes (Preface, £25)
IT’S NOT easy to be impartial when talking about the work of a friend. The author of this book has been one for 30 years and I have fond memories of travelling with him to Cuba and the Dominican Republic on many occasions.
This elegant book, which is his distillation of a lifetime’s experience, is the perfect gift for the cigar smoker who has everything. For the cost of an average cigar, you’ll get a wealth of information, knowledge and wisdom that is as enjoyable, easy and smooth as a perfectly aged vintage cigar.
Even if you don’t open it, but just leave it next to the humidor, Cigars will give pleasure by looking decorative as the publishers have done a beautiful job with the binding and the quality of the paper. I’m fortunate enough to own boxes of cigars signed by remarkable characters, such as Nick Freeman, Zino Davidoff and Fidel Castro—now, I’ll be keeping a few signed copies of this book to one side as well.
For a cigar merchant, reading about the many limited and regional editions or the numerous technical terms and abbreviations is not a big deal. For the general reader, however, the A–Z lexicon appendices will demystify what can sometimes be a daunting maze of recondite terminology.
For me, the real revelation was the history. Having thought I knew so many things about cigars and their background, I now realise it was far fewer.
Nicholas Foulkes takes you on a journey from the 15th to the 21st centuries via all the interesting stops between. Edward Sahakian
‘This is her home turf and she writes with confident affection about gardens that are old friends