Thomas Gainsborough, 1727–1788: The Painter and the Name He Shares

Two unrelated things in England are called Gainsborough. One is a market town in Lincolnshire with a fifteenth-century manor house in it. The other is a painter born in Sudbury, in Suffolk, ninety miles away, who never worked in that town and had no family connection to it. This page is about the painter; the surname and the place name simply coincide.

Portraits for money, landscape for himself

Gainsborough said more than once that portraiture paid and landscape did not, and his career is the working out of that arithmetic. The commissions that supported him were faces; the pictures he returned to without being asked were trees, lanes, carts and weather. The tension is visible in the work itself, where a sitter is frequently placed in a landscape that has plainly received more attention than the commission required.

Mr and Mrs Andrews is the clearest early case. It is a double portrait of a young landowning couple, and roughly half the canvas is given to their Suffolk fields, painted with an exactness — the stubble in rows, the oak, the light — that the sitters themselves do not receive.

Suffolk, Ipswich, Bath, London

He was born in Sudbury in 1727, trained in London, and returned to Suffolk to work. The move to Bath in 1759 put him among sitters who could pay properly, and his manner loosened and grew more fluent there. He moved to London in 1774 and worked for the court and the aristocracy until his death in 1788. Four places, and a style that visibly changes with each of them.

The quarrel with the Royal Academy

He was among the founder members of the Royal Academy in 1768, and his relationship with it was difficult almost immediately. He objected to how his pictures were hung, withdrew from exhibiting more than once, and after 1784 showed his work at his own house instead. The dispute was about display rather than doctrine: a portrait hung too high, at the wrong angle to the light, is not the picture that was painted.

That put him at an angle to the academic tradition that the next century would rebel against from the other direction — one painter finding the institution too constraining in 1784, a group of students finding it too complacent in 1848.

How he actually painted

Contemporaries who watched him work describe a method that explains the look of the late portraits: very thin paint, brushes with unusually long handles, and a habit of standing well back from the canvas so that the picture and the sitter could be judged at the same distance the viewer would eventually use. He is also reported to have worked in dim light. The result is handling that dissolves at close range and resolves at a few paces, which is the opposite of the highly finished surface his patrons were mostly paying for.

Gainsborough and Reynolds

The two dominate English portraiture of the period and were temperamentally opposite. Reynolds theorised, lectured and built a case for painting as a learned profession; Gainsborough was impatient with theory and worked by eye. Reynolds nonetheless devoted a lecture to him after his death, which is the more generous act of the two given how little Gainsborough had said in return.

Questions about Thomas Gainsborough