Great way to put the family in the picture
The sheer number and quality of Thomas Gainsborough’s portraits of his relatives show both his enduring devotion to them and his extraordinary technical skill
NEARLY all the portraits Thomas Gainsborough painted of his family make up this show. It’s exhilarating just for the way he manipulates paint. The faces of the people he knew and saw all the time, their clothing, particular fabrics and shiny buttons, the people’s hair and eyelashes and eyebrows and their serious or smiling expressions — all this emerges from brushstrokes that are full of independent liveliness.
If a face occasionally looks a bit stuck on, at the same time every expression and pose has a genuine sweetness. Every picture is tender.
Few artists painted their family as much. The closest was Rubens, who painted about half the number of family portraits that Gainsborough finally left. Gainsborough did 50. He didn’t leave any written comment on the matter but he did reveal in letters that painting commissioned portraits often felt like a prison and he would prefer to paint landscapes — but they didn’t pay.
He died at about the same age as Rubens, as it happens. Rubens was 62 and Gainsborough 61. But they were very different. Rubens, who lived in the previous century to Gainsborough, was one of the grandest figures in Europe, knighted three times by different monarchs. Gainsborough, who died from cancer in 1788, came from an ordinary family in the weaving trade.
He was talented and managed to get some training as an artist and then to make a living as a portrait painter whose patrons were West Country aristocrats. His family portraits show people who a re mo s t ly n o t p o o r b u t w h o a re certainly quite ordinary.
The paintings are unexplained, then. He probably lived surrounded by them.