ARTS In a pleasant landskip
BRYAN ROBERTSON
Arriving back from the New York art- politico maelstrom, in which the whole of contemporary art is geared to a producer- consumer set of rigid patterns, it is com- forting to find the intransitory splendours and delights of Thomas Gainsborough in- habiting the Queen's Gallery at Buckingham Palace. For he, more than any other English artist, was also subject to a producer-con- sumer situation of his own time: in the full flood of the elegantly mannered, disreput- ably or disarmingly enlivened, eighteenth century. Gainsborough's true contemporaries of the spirit, Watteau and Goya, were fac- ing the challenge in their own way and with wider horizons; but Gainsborough, after his early and enraptured allegiance to the land- scape painting of Rubens and the figure compositions of Van Dyck, was hemmed in by the natives.
Reynolds who, Gainsborough believed, thwarted his advancement for he 'was very near being King's painter only Reynold's Friends stood in the way', was foremost among them, but Gainsborough had in fact little competition save in commerce. And he was able to deal equably, without strain, with the requirements of a consumer/pro- ducer tradition in the artistic life of England; his patrons were members of the royal family, aristocrats, the landed gentry or friends and relations, all of whom were either knowledgeable or, if rough and ready, relatively easy to convert into at least a tolerably civilised attitude of acceptance of what he wanted to create. Gainsborough had other issues to contend with; but he was spared those pressures of orthodoxy and fashion organised by a network of dealers, museum officials, biennales, 'inter- national style' government art departments, critics and ambitious collectors which pre- vail in New York and are now only too readily discernible in London.
The exhibition at the Queen's Gallery contains all the pictures by Gainsborough, still the least truly known or fully appre- ciated of all English painters, in the royal collection. Given its evident limitations (mostly portraits of the royal family, their children and friends; and only one, but exquisite, drawing), this specialised presenta- tion of Gainsborough is tremendously im- pressive: irresistible in what is disclosed. For here, of course, is not the Gainsborough of Mr and Mrs Joseph Andrews in a meadow, in which a young husband and wife stand and recline by a tree in their estate and are so subordinately placed, so subtly engulfed by air, light and nature, that the extensive horizontal landscape of high summer to their left and right makes them subject to a new, cultivated Arcadia of the 'county families': nor do we find even, in grander, more flamboyant terms, the Gainsborough of The Morning Walk in which a handsome young couple, scin- tillating in their finery, at ease—enthralled —in their youthful grace, stroll toward you: looming up monumentally, like Watteau's Gilles in the landscape which appears to accompany and extend the swirling tautness or fulsomeness of their own clothes, their own tender presence in nature.
It is impossible to consider Gainsborough without awareness of the fact that the 'figure in a landscape' concept, from the earliest times, is exactly what Berenson believed it to be: the noblest summit of art, containing as it can do all the permuta- tions of the dialogue between man and his universe in visual terms. In Gainsborough's finest work the question continuously arises as to whether the figures are in a state of equilibrium with nature, are projected like wraiths from a dominating context, or en- gender, transmit the landscape from them- selves, as a subsidiary receptacle. Go to Kenwood and explore Lady Howe, one of Gainsborough's masterpieces (now badly hung with a chandelier blocking the long view of the painting which once prevailed when it dominated the Orangery), and then see the ghostlier, far less substantial, figure in a landscape in a nearby room, and ponder these questions.
What matters is not the degree to which a Gainsborough painting is carried through in depth or to a fulsome pitch, left as a sketch, or intended as a definitive statement in the merest accents of flickering, feathery brushwork in which colour itself is com- parably muted and schematised. The decid- ing factor is Gainsborough's extraordinary apprehension of psychological portraiture and the ever-present tension set up between human figures and landscape. All of which is as relevant now as it ever was—even at a time when art is mainly quite abstract and portraiture, psychological or otherwise, is in the hands of about three practitioners (inter- nationally): because at a certain moment the human figure entered the landscape, passed through it, and came out as an em- bodiment of it as well as itself, so that we get gestural painting and abstract art with landscape references, invigorated by the abstract hieroglyphs of human involvement.
The royal portraits have in the main sketchy landscape backgrounds, recessed to one skip of the standing figure which in- variably leans against a horse, a pillar or some other convenient device to act as a demi-foil to the figure. But then you might say that Gainsborough, so eager to 'make musick with Friends in a pleasant landskip or listen to the sweet strains of a viol de gamba in the Country', brought the wild- ness, profusion, tenderness, swiftly glancing effects of light, rippling water, even drifting woodsmoke into the apricot-gold, plum-reds, gentian violets and cornflower blues of the stuffs which make up the clothes of his sitters, so ravishing is the painting of these clothes with their silvered laces and floating chiffons, sheen of silk and furry nap of velvet. The great portrait of Queen Char- lotte is a landscape in itself: you need only confine your attention to the painting of the bejewelled skirt.
There has yet to be a proper assessment of Gainsborough, though the present gather- ing of his work is a revelation. In the 'fifties, Ellis Waterhouse amassed a different and more intimate kind of revelation with a selection of Gainsborough's work at the Tate, strongly biased in favour of the then recent discoveries in English country houses. with an emphasis on the late, romantic, sketch-like works. One of these, the mag-
nificent Diana and -Acteon is now on view at the Queen's Gallery; but if a truly definitive collection of Gainsborough's drawings and paintings could only be assembled, it would dumbfound the English and startle Europe, for here is our Watteau and Goya in one.
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