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Gainsborough in
London
Susan Sloman
New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 2021 Hardback. 404 pp. 238 colour illustrations. ISBN 978-0956800787. $45/£35
Reviewed by Laurent Bury Université Lumière–Lyon 2
In 2002, Yale University Press published Gainsborough in Bath, a book in which Susan Sloman scrutinised the
period going from 1759 to 1774, when a young British painter, having settled in
the most fashionable city of the kingdom, turned into a major European artist.
As an independent scholar, Sloman then went on with her research, being the
author or co-author of several publications on other aspects of Thomas
Gainsborough’s art. Two decades later, she is back with Gainsborough in London, the expected sequel of her previous volume,
which focuses on the last fifteen years in the painter’s life. It is worth
quoting the warning expressed by Sloman herself: this book is not a biography
strictly speaking, but “a collection of thematic explorations of the artist’s
career, based on a re-examination of the paintings, drawing and prints and the
unearthing of new documents” [1]. The new book follows the same pattern as Gainsborough in Bath, which also claimed
to rely on “freshly discovered documents and a variety of little-known
contemporary published sources”. While Bath could be seen as “a training ground
and a springboard to greater things” [5], London, where Gainsborough had
studied with Hogarth in the 1740s, was the place where he could truly assert
himself as Reynolds’s rival, and where he “managed to balance down-to-earth
productivity and creative risk-taking” [7]. The first chapters are devoted to Gainsborough’s lodgings in the
capital, the west wing of Schomberg House, in Pall Mall, which had been
previously occupied by King George III’s sister, the duchess of Brunswick, and
which was very conveniently close to the Prince of Wales’s Carlton House and
various exhibition rooms. In spite of the imprecision of the surviving
accounts, Susan Sloman brilliantly exploits all the evidence available in order
to reconstruct as closely as possible the arrangements that were made by the
painter who created a studio and business premises behind the house proper. In
London, Gainsborough worked with only one assistant: his sister’s son,
Gainsborough Dupont, who helped him in the finishing of portraits. Even though
the nephew assimilated some of his technique, he was far from being as gifted
as his uncle. Gainsborough was famous for “painting at speed”, “painting at
once”, asking from his models only a limited number of sittings. He privileged
colour and a thin, watery texture, while Reynolds favoured composition and
heavy impasto. His originality resided in his brushwork, his manner being based
on “indecision more than precision”, on (English) tenderness rather than
(French) hard brilliancy. Unfortunately, there is hardly anything left of the various decors
Gainsborough painted for the concert hall built by Johann Christian Bach and
Carl Friedrich Abel, or of the frontispiece figures he designed for the King’s
Theatre, Haymarket. Hence the slightly frustrating nature of the chapter
analysing the artist’s relations with the London musical world. A fascinating
essay retraces the difficult relationship Gainsborough had with the Royal
Academy, where none of his works had been displayed between 1773 and 1777, and
from which he decided to withdraw in 1784 after a violent quarrel with the
hanging committee or “Committee of Arrangement” because of the unsatisfactory position
attributed to his portrait of The Three Eldest Princesses. In spite of
such prestigious commissions, and though Gainsborough was appreciated for his
noble but simple, unostentatious figures, his “at once regal and informal”
effigies [132], the favour he enjoyed with the royal family was never made
official: when Ramsay died in 1784, Zoffany having displeased George III, Reynolds
was preferred as successor to the title of painter to the King. Gainsborough
had also managed to “win over” the Prince of Wales, producing splendid
portraits of his mistresses, “Perdita” Robinson and Mrs Elliott. The painter
was thus granted the aristocratic patronage of various courtiers and
courtesans, who liked being depicted in Van Dyck masquerade costumes and
Rubens-like poses. In the 1780s, several ladies decided to have their portrait
retouched because hair fashion had changed. While his previous portraits tended
to be rather static, Gainsborough then tried to create more active attitudes,
thus emulating the President of the Royal Academy, sometimes with slightly
awkward results. Action and allegory came more naturally to his rivals. Sitters could choose between “Heads” (which included the torso, despite
their name, and even the hands in certain cases), “Half-lengths” and
“Full-lengths”, the prices varying from 30 guineas for the smaller paintings,
to 60 for the second category and 100 or eventually 120 for the third one (a
useful appendix provides more detailed examples, at the end of the book). Most
of those portraits were specially commissioned, but there also existed “show
pictures” which the artist displayed in his studio for visitors. In the last
five years of his life, Gainsborough started painting large group portraits
but, out of six, only two have survived intact. Some were destroyed by fire and
are now only known through contemporary prints, others were cut into pieces. It
is no coincidence if Mr and Mrs Hallett
was chosen as a cover illustration for the volume, as it remains one of the
most splendid examples of the complex integration of landscape and portrait in
his work. Reynolds was reputed for his portraits and for his history paintings,
but Gainsborough was the only British artist of his time to exhibit both
portraits and landscapes. All along his career, he exploited a limited number
of compositional themes (a peasant cart crossing a bridge, a shepherd and his
sheep, etc.), but his style changed radically over the decades. As opposed to
some artists who grow bored when they recycle the same ideas, Gainsborough was
stimulated by variations in different techniques: “the more he repeated a
subject, the more it challenged and excited him” [208]. His landscapes inspired
him to try his hand at making his own etchings after his drawings. Fancy
pictures – landscapes with life-size figures brought to the front – were his
most remarkable innovation in the 1780s. Those uncommissioned paintings
occupied the summer months, when there was less demand for portraits. Their
humble, rustic subjects were admired for their “good taste”, with “no idea of
dirt & wretchedness”, according to contemporary accounts, and they also
allowed for pathos, with religious undertones. Here again, several were
destroyed by fire and are now only known through prints or copies. Gainsborough only left Britain once, when he went to Antwerp in 1783, to
see the Rubens in the cathedral. His own collection of paintings favoured Flemish
and Dutch artists. Even when the models were in England in his time, his copies
after Titian or Rubens were probably made after prints, as the colours could be
widely different. If Gainsborough was eventually acclaimed as a “universal
genius”, it was because he had managed to widen his horizons beyond his natural
gift. His intellectual range was manifested through forays in genres which he
had hardly ever practiced before, such as seascapes, animal pictures or history
paintings. Two works summarise this late evolution in his art: The Mall (1783) and the splendidly
unfinished Diana and Actaeon (1784),
which make it even more regrettable that he could not agree on a price for a
possible contribution to Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery. More than the biography
published less than one month after his death by his friend Philip Thicknesse,
the highest tribute paid to the late Gainsborough was the fourteenth Discourse
delivered in December 1788 at the Royal Academy by his rival Reynolds. By the
depth of its research as much as the quality of its reproductions, Susan
Sloman’s book is another vibrant homage to the painter, opportunely published a
few years before England and the world celebrate the tricentenary of his birth.
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