Exhibitions 1
Young Gainsborough (National Gallery, till 31 March)
Brilliant and elusive debut
Martin Gayford
Damn Gentlemen,' wrote Thomas Gainsborough to his musician friend William Jackson in 1767. 'There is not such a set of Enemies to a real artist in the world as they are, if not kept at a proper distance.' But this was strange, because, as is shown by the National Gallery's exhibi- tion Young Gainsborough, no one has so accurately caught the appearance and habi- tat of the English rural gentry as did the painter in his youth. Mutatis rnutandis, in cords and pullovers rather than tricorn hats and buckled shoes, one can still find the same plain but pleasant faces, the same gangling limbs in converted Georgian rec- tories up and down the land.
But these figures in Gainsborough's early `Wooded landscape with peasant resting, by Thomas Gainsborough portraits are specifically local gentry and members of the East Anglian middle class- es — Mr and Mrs Robert Andrews of the Auberies, near Sudbury, John Plampin, of Chadacre Hall, near Lavenham, The Revd John Chafy, curate of Bricett, playing his violincello in a landscape. Grander sitters, great aristocratic magnates and royalty, came later when Gainsborough's style itself had grown grander.
Early on, he kept these minor Suffolk notables quite literally at a proper distance — they are painted far below life size, embedded in a ravishing rococo landscape, as if seen across a few yards of grass and tree-roots. There are many awkwardnesses and inconsistancies in Gainsborough's figure drawing at this stage — when he was in his teens and early twenties — quite farcically so at times. Mr and Mrs Carter, for exam- ple, are an ill-assorted couple, because, though seated side by side on the same bench, he is drawn on a scale at least twice as large as his wife, with the result that she resembles a largish ventriloquist's dummy.
If one looks closely at even Mrs Robert Andrews, in one of the most familiar of all English paintings, she seems to be floating a foot or so above that pretty wrought-iron bench, her feet implausibly small and far from her waist. These are the faults of a barely trained, almost naive artist. But the magic is such, you don't want to look hard. What you notice is the miraculous balance between truthfulness and artifice. The lumpy-featured, sharp-nosed, cornmon-sen- sical couple are set in a delectable land- scape of apple green, peach, powder blue and dove grey. It is a perfectly English pic- ture: down-to-earth, no-nonsense, and at the same time utterly romantic. The portrait of John Plampin is an almost equally beguiling image of the coun- try gent, taking his ease on a bank, his gun- dog by his side, with a leafy Suffolk prospect laid out below him. How did Gainsborough, when scarcely out of his teens, arrive at such results? It is not entirely easy to say. Gainsborough was scarcely an enigmatic man — his recorded remarks give an impression of debonair charm, and garru- lous openness. The royal favour he enjoyed later on resulted in part from his being able `to talk bawdy to the King, and morality to the Prince of Wales'. He was fond of a glass from time to time. One of his daugh- ters told the diarist Farington that 'her father often exceeded the bounds of tem- perance, being occasionally unable to work for a week afterwards'. He wondered at the `equal application' of his friend and rival, Sir Joshua Reynolds. But — also unlike Reynolds — he was not an intellectual, avoiding the company of literary men 'who were his aversion' and `scarcely ever' reading a book. As Malcolm Cormack has pointed out, while Reynolds cultivated the friendship of Dr Johnson, Gainsborough's acquaintances tended to be musicians. All the evidence suggests that he had an unintellectual, unliterary approach to his art (the peasants and trav- ellers who inhabit his landscapes were there, he said, simply as 'a little business for the Eye to be drawn from the Trees 01 order to return to them with more glee'). Gainsborough was sent to London aged 13 by his father, a failed milliner turned Postmaster of Sudbury. Over the next few years he somehow put together the rudi- ments of this delicious early style. Much of it is already there, especially the fresh deli- cacy of the brushwork — in the picture of the dog Bumper, dated 1745, when the painter was 18.
It is easy enough to pick apart Gainsbor- ough's various influences, and this exhibi- tion assiduously does so. Like many of the artists he mixed with at the St Martin's Lane Academy and Old Slaughter's Coffee House, headquarters of the English rococo movement, Gainsborough was inspired by the elegant strain of French painting deriv- ing from Watteau. The stiff little figures of his conversation-piece portraits are descended from those that inhabit the work of older contemporaries such as Arthur Devis and Francis Hayman. His early land- scapes, almost cloud by cloud, tree by tree, come out of 17th-century Dutch masters, notably Jacob van Ruisdael and Hobbema.
And yet, by some mysterious process, all these diverse ingredients are Gainsbor- oughised. If one compares his early land- scape `Gainsborough's Forest' with the small Ruisdael that hangs opposite it, it Is obvious that, though much is similar, the mood has changed. Gainsborough's sky and trees and track are lighter and looser, the atmosphere is less dramatic, more lyri- cal. It is Mozart, rather than Bach. The most Watteauesque of his paintings is the very early 'Conversation in a Park'. But again, compared with a painting by Lan- cret, a real imitator of Watteau, how much less artfully chic, how much more truthfully gawky the Gainsborough looks. His individuality was in the blend — D. utch realism, French charm, English innocence — but also in a sense of touch, of light and space, which was as personal as the way a composer turns a melody. Thus the pink skirt of the girl in 'Conversation in a Park' becomes a virtuoso display of creamy, precise brushwork, like a cadenza In music (by the way, although the cata- logue insists that she does not resemble the future Mrs Gainsborough, in fact, as com- parison with the picture beside shows, she clearly does, and the male figure is obvi- ously Gainsborough himself). Above all, these early Gainsboroughs are animated by their skies, with their fleecy mulberry and grey clouds, and intervals of blue - sky, which are poems in paint by themselves, and cast patches of light on the ground (`cloudy with sunny intervals' is of Course a familiar kind of weather to East Anglian), It is the aerial fantasy of these skies that give the 'View of the Charter- house' and 'Mr and Mrs Robert Andrews' their space and air. The main drawback of this exhibition is that it has not got quite enough young Gainsboroughs in it. With a few more loans `Henage Lloyd and his sister Lucy' from the Pitzwilliam, for example. and 'A Land- scape with a Woodcutter' from Woburn Abbey it would have been possible to give a better account of this, one of the most brilliant and elusive debuts of any Painter in the history of British art.
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