Thomas Gainsborough; Goya
What did Gainsborough think of the sitters for his famous society portraits? This question was prompted by a recent visit to Gainsborough’s family home in Sudbury, Suffolk.
The house is now a museum devoted both to Gainsborough (many portraits and landscapes) and, in a large modern annexe, to temporary exhibitions. This summer, the works of Cedric Morris and his partner and collaborator in art education, Arthur Lett-Haines, are shown. This is an exhibition of mainly 1930s art that is well worth visiting, even if you are lukewarm about Gainsborough himself.
Most of Gainsborough’s upper-class subjects now strike one as arrogant and smug, secure in in their rank, lands and entitlement (plus ca change, in recent years).
But it seems that Gainsborough, far from worshipping that status quo, painted with gritted teeth. He disliked his society commissions, even though they were the bedrock of his finances. In Wikipedia, there’s a wonderful quote:
“…damn gentlemen, there is not such a set of Enemies to a real artist as they are, if not kept at a proper distance. They think… that they reward your merit by their company & notice; but I …know that they have but one part worth looking at, and that is their purse; their Hearts are seldom near enough the right place to get a sight of..”
Gainsborough knew on which side his canvas was oiled. Most of his sitters were indeed arrogant and smug. Gainsborough gave them those attributes right back.
Gainsborough’s real painterly love was landscape, in his time a financially unrewarding subject. His brooding vistas, woods, and country scenes hugely influenced Constable and a whole genre of later painting.
He smuggled this love into some of his society portraits – famously the one of the young Sudbury squire and his wife, Mr and Mrs Andrews, presented as complacently nonchalant in the foreground of their vast estate, carefully rendered.
There are a few (small) Constable paintings in in Gainsborough House. Constable was born and worked nearby.
Goya lived a generation later, in a different country and culture. But I can’t help comparing him with Gainsborough in the matter of portraiture. Goya was also a society painter of aristocracy and court. Like Gainsborough, Goya cared little for most of his upper-class sitters.
Unlike Gainsborough, Goya somehow pulled off the trick of expressing his contempt in his paintings, whilst (presumably) leaving his customers satisfied. He conveys stupidity and cruelty disguised as royal or ducal arrogance and stern worldliness. The subject and his acolytes see the qualities they want to see, whilst others grin and applaud Goya’s ironies.
Gainsborough and Goya both painted family, friends, and persons they admired. There one sees in both tenderness, affection, and wit (Goya’s portrait of the Duchess of Alba, for example, is definitely not a society portrait).
Spare a thought for the 18th Century portraitists. Their subjects may have often been repellent individuals. The painters were decidedly not.
July 2024
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