Art
Gainsborough Ax artist like Reynolds who is fundamentally academic never changes his style in any but superficial ways. He may paint now a portrait, now an allegory, now a history, but in all cases he has a definite approach to his art, he is concerned with the most generalised features of the human character, and he works by means of principles which never allow him to go very far from his average either in method or in quality. With Gainsborough the situation is wholly different. Unlike Reynolds, he works almost entirely by instinct, and not by calculation. He is excited by a subject which automatically suggests a particular method of treatment, very likely different from any that he has used before. This fact has two main results : first, that Gainsborough is a far more uneven artist than Reynolds, that when he has to paint a commissioned portrait of an unsympathetic subject the result is not merely dull and respectable, as Reynolds would make it, but is posi- t ively disastrous ; secondly, that Gainshorough's style changes, if not from year to year, at any rate from decade to decade, and more particularly from theme to theme.
These points are admirably illustrated in the exhibition at Sir Philip •Sassoon's house, 45 Park Lane, at which over a hundred of Gainsborough's paintings are collected together, forming the first representative exhibition of this artist held in London during the present century. The exhibition is particularly important because it includes many paintings which have not left their homes in English country houses for many years and which were absent from the English exhibition at Burlington House in 1934.
It is a Net, well enough known but none the less important, that Gainsborough began life as a landscape painter and only gradually introduced figures into his paintings in order that he might sell them as portrait groups to his patrons. Many of his most brilliant early landscapes or portraits-in-landscape were familiar to us, but one or two in the present exhibition come as revelations, particularly Mr. Harcourt Johnstone's Landscape with Church and Mr. Kenneth Clark's Drinkstone Park, the former strangely recalling Corot in its silvery tones of tree-trunk and church, the latter showing how far Gains- borough could borrow from the Dutch and yet eliminate every trace of romanticism from their style by reducing every object in the painting to complete. stillness.
In his maturity Gainsborough is generally said to have been most successful in his portraits of great ladies, and it is indeed hard to imagine anything more completely satisfactory in its way than the portrait of Mrs. John Douglas (18), less wildly romantic and unreal than the Lady Bate Dudley, and less harsh
than the Duchess of Hamilton. The portrait of Mrs. John
Douglas is affected but not unreal ; it is the last word in flattery, but only of a flattery which would easily convince the sitter. The Morning Walk is of a slightly different kind. It has been said that this picture represents the eighteenth century as we should wish it to have been. It is, in fact, a dream picture, but a dream picture which imposes its atmo- sphere on us so completely that we do not for a moment chal- lenge its rightness. If the Morning Walk sums up completely the aristocratic elegance of the eighteenth century, the portrait of Sir Benjamin Truman represents equally completely the opposite side, of the period. Though Gainsborough was bril- liant in painting brilliant women, he had no need for a beautiful sitter to make a good portrait. Indeed one feels that he was more directly at ease and in sympathy with the ugly stolidity of Truman than even with the charm of the Halletts, and that this sitter has inspired him to produce the most honest and splendid of his later works.
Towards the end of his life Gainsborough was able to indulge once more his passion for landscape painting. But, alas ! his long training in aristocratic portraiture had apparently poisoned his outlook on nature. Instead of the masterly realism of the early landscapes, he can only give us the incredi- ble but empty dexterity of Lord Lansdowne's Landscape with Cattle, or Mr. Ashcroft's Landscape. But far more melancholy
is another group of his later works, representing pretty scenes of country life, such as the Duke of Rutland's Woodcutter's Return. If we must have in painting the condescension of the aristocracy towards the peasantry, let us at least have it decked out with the technical brilliance of a Fragonard.
ANTHONY BLUNT.
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