Thomas
Gainsborough
(b Sudbury, Suffolk, bapt 14 May 1727; d London, 2
Aug 1788).
English painter, draughtsman and printmaker. He was the contemporary and
rival of Joshua Reynolds, who honoured him on 10 December 1788 with a
valedictory Discourse (pubd London, 1789), in which he stated:
‘If ever this nation should produce genius sufficient to acquire to us
the honourable distinction of an English School, the name of
Gainsborough will be transmitted to posterity, in the history of Art,
among the very first of that rising name.’ He went on to consider
Gainsborough’s portraits, landscapes and fancy pictures within the Old
Master tradition, against which, in his view, modern painting had always
to match itself. Reynolds was acknowledging a general opinion that
Gainsborough was one of the most significant painters of their
generation. Less ambitious than Reynolds in his portraits, he
nevertheless painted with elegance and virtuosity. He founded his
landscape manner largely on the study of northern European artists and
developed a very beautiful and often poignant imagery of the British
countryside. By the mid-1760s he was making formal allusions to a wide
range of previous art, from Rubens and Watteau to, eventually, Claude
and Titian. He was as various in his drawings and was among the first to
take up the new printmaking techniques of aquatint and soft-ground
etching. Because his friend, the musician and painter William Jackson
(1730–1803), claimed that Gainsborough detested reading, there has been
a tendency to deny him any literacy. He was, nevertheless, as his
surviving letters show, verbally adept, extremely witty and highly
cultured. He loved music and performed well. He was a person of rapidly
changing moods, humorous, brilliant and witty. At the time of his death
he was expanding the range of his art, having lived through one of the
more complex and creative phases in the history of British painting. He
painted with unmatched skill and bravura; while giving the impression of
a kind of holy innocence, he was among the most artistically learned and
sophisticated painters of his generation. It has been usual to consider
his career in terms of the rivalry with Reynolds that was acknowledged
by their contemporaries; while Reynolds maintained an intellectual and
academic ideal of art, Gainsborough grounded his imagery on contemporary
life, maintaining an aesthetic outlook previously given its most
powerful expression by William Hogarth. His portraits, landscapes and
subject pictures are only now coming to be studied in all their
complexity; having previously been viewed as being isolated from the
social, philosophical and ideological currents of their time, they have
yet to be fully related to them. It is clear, however, that his
landscapes and rural pieces, and some of his portraits, were as
significant as Reynolds acknowledged them to be in 1788.
