Thomas Gainsborough

Thomas Gainsborough was born on May 14, 1727, in Sudbury, a small wool town in Suffolk, the youngest son of John Gainsborough, a cloth merchant, and his wife Mary, who was skilled at flower painting ^[1]. The family was large and its finances were unsteady; John Gainsborough was declared bankrupt in 1733, though he later found work as the town postmaster. The boy grew up surrounded by the gentle river valleys of the Stour, countryside he sketched obsessively and returned to in his imagination for the rest of his life ^[2].

Accounts of his childhood, many gathered after his death by his friend the musician William Jackson and by early biographers, describe a pupil more interested in drawing than in Latin. Around 1740, aged about thirteen, he was sent to London to train as an artist ^[1]. There he entered the circle of the French draughtsman and engraver Hubert Gravelot, who introduced him to the light, decorative manner of French rococo design. He also absorbed lessons from Francis Hayman, who painted convivial scenes for the Vauxhall pleasure gardens, and studied at the St Martin's Lane Academy, the informal school associated with William Hogarth ^[3].

Equally formative was the trade in Dutch seventeenth century landscape paintings then flowing through London salerooms. Gainsborough restored and copied works by Jacob van Ruisdael and Jan Wijnants, and their naturalistic handling of trees, sandy tracks, and cloudy skies shaped his earliest independent pictures ^[2].

In July 1746 the nineteen year old painter married Margaret Burr, an illegitimate daughter of Henry, third Duke of Beaufort, who settled an annuity of two hundred pounds on her. The income gave the young couple a rare cushion of security ^[1]. After a short period in London the Gainsboroughs returned to Sudbury around 1748, and in 1752 they moved to Ipswich, the nearest substantial market for portrait commissions ^[3].

The Suffolk years produced some of his freshest work. Mr and Mrs Andrews, painted around 1750 and now in the National Gallery in London, places a landowning couple beside their own cornfields under a wide East Anglian sky, joining portraiture and landscape in a single composition ^[4]. In 1748 he presented The Charterhouse, a small roundel view, to the Foundling Hospital in London, an early sign of ambition beyond provincial clientele ^[2]. Yet demand for pure landscape was thin, and portraits of merchants, clergy, and squires paid the bills.

The decisive move came in 1759, when Gainsborough transferred his family to Bath, the most fashionable resort in England. Wealthy visitors taking the waters wanted their likenesses painted, and his practice expanded quickly. Study of Anthony van Dyck's portraits in nearby country house collections, particularly at Wilton, transformed his style: his figures grew taller and more elegant, his brushwork looser and more suggestive ^[3]. From 1761 he sent pictures to the Society of Artists exhibitions in London, and his reputation spread far beyond the West Country ^[1].

Any account of Thomas Gainsborough achievements begins with the Royal Academy. When the institution was founded by royal charter in December 1768, he was among the thirty six original members, the only founder then working outside London ^[3]. He exhibited there from 1769, sending portraits that drew crowds, among them the picture of the actress Mary Robinson as Perdita and full lengths of society beauties. His relationship with the Academy was stormy: he quarrelled over the hanging of his pictures in 1773 and again, finally, in 1784, after which he showed work only in his own house ^[1].

His most famous single image, The Blue Boy, painted around 1770 and now at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, dresses a young sitter in a shimmering Van Dyck costume of blue satin, a knowing tribute to the seventeenth century master he revered ^[5]. Other celebrated canvases include the double portrait The Morning Walk, the tender study of his daughters chasing a butterfly, and portraits of the musicians Johann Christian Bach and Carl Friedrich Abel, friends whose company he preferred to that of most sitters ^[4].

Royal favour crowned the London years. Although Joshua Reynolds held the official post of Principal Painter to the King, George III and Queen Charlotte personally preferred Gainsborough, and in 1781 he painted the royal couple, following in 1782 with a series of ovals of the royal family ^[1]. Alongside the portraits he never stopped painting landscapes, works such as The Harvest Wagon and The Watering Place, composed in the studio from memory, drawings, and even table top models built of cork, coal, sand, and broccoli standing in for trees. Late in life he added "fancy pictures", sentimental studies of cottage children and peasant girls that fetched higher prices than his landscapes ever had ^[2].

Gainsborough's marriage to Margaret Burr lasted more than forty years, though his letters suggest it was often tense; he admitted his own restlessness and credited his wife's steadiness with keeping the household in order ^[1]. The couple had two daughters, Mary and Margaret, whom he painted repeatedly with unguarded affection. He hoped they might earn a living as landscape painters, an unusual ambition for daughters of the period, but Mary's unhappy marriage to the oboist Johann Christian Fischer collapsed within months, and she suffered from mental illness in later life ^[3].

Music was his consuming private passion. He played the viola da gamba, collected instruments, and once claimed in a letter to William Jackson that he was sick of portraits and wished to walk off to some sweet village where he could paint landscapes and enjoy the fag end of life in quietness and ease ^[2]. The remark, preserved in his published correspondence, captures a lifelong tension: the work that made him rich was not the work he loved.

Contemporaries found him witty, generous, quick tempered, and impatient with pretension. Unlike Reynolds, who built his art on learned theory and Italian travel, Gainsborough never left Britain and distrusted academic rules, trusting instead his eye and an astonishing facility of hand ^[4]. He painted by candlelight with brushes on handles up to six feet long, standing back so that sitter and canvas could be judged at the same distance.

In 1774 Gainsborough left Bath for London, taking part of Schomberg House on Pall Mall, a fashionable address close to the court ^[1]. Commissions flowed steadily through the studio, and in the early 1780s he travelled in the Lake District, which fed a new grandeur into his late mountain landscapes. He also experimented with a "showbox", a device of his own design in which painted glass transparencies were lit from behind by candles, an attempt to give landscape the glow of nature itself; the box survives in the Victoria and Albert Museum ^[2].

After the final break with the Royal Academy in 1784 over the hanging height of a royal group portrait, he mounted annual exhibitions in his own showroom at Schomberg House ^[3]. The late portraits, among them the shimmering full length of the dancer Giovanna Baccelli and the unfinished portrait of Mrs Sheridan set against a windswept landscape, show his handling at its most liquid and daring.

In the spring of 1788 he became aware of a hard swelling in his neck, which proved to be cancer. He died at Schomberg House on August 2, 1788, aged sixty one ^[1]. On his deathbed he was reconciled with Reynolds, and tradition, first recorded by Reynolds himself, reports his last words as a promise that they would all be going to heaven, with Van Dyck of the company. At his own request he was buried quietly at St Anne's church in Kew, beside his friend the painter Joshua Kirby ^[3].

Anyone asking who was Thomas Gainsborough finds the answer split between two arts. In portraiture he offered Georgian Britain an image of itself that was elegant without stiffness, catching likeness with strokes that dissolve into flickers of paint when viewed up close. Reynolds, delivering his fourteenth Discourse to the Royal Academy a few months after his rival's death, praised those odd scratches and marks that assemble into form at the proper distance, and predicted that Gainsborough's name would be transmitted to posterity among the very first of the rising English school ^[6].

In landscape his influence ran even deeper. John Constable, another Suffolk painter, wrote that the landscape of Gainsborough was soothing, tender, and affecting, and that on looking at them we find tears in our eyes and know not what brings them. Through Constable and the English watercolourists, Gainsborough's woodland scenes fed the broader current of Romantic landscape painting ^[2].

His pictures now anchor collections on both sides of the Atlantic, at the National Gallery and Tate in London, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Huntington in California. The purchase of The Blue Boy by the American railway magnate Henry Huntington in 1921, then reported as the highest price ever paid for a painting, provoked national mourning in Britain and confirmed the picture's iconic standing; a century later it returned briefly to the National Gallery for an anniversary display ^[5]. His birthplace on Gainsborough Street in Sudbury operates as Gainsborough's House, a museum devoted to his life and work, and a bronze statue of the painter, palette in hand, stands on the town's Market Hill ^[7]. For readers of any Thomas Gainsborough biography, the essential Thomas Gainsborough facts endure: a wool merchant's son from Suffolk who painted a kingdom's elite while dreaming, always, of trees.