GAINSBOROUGH AT THE GROSVENOR GALLERY
‘Ifever this nation should produce genius sufficient to acquire for us the honourable distinction of an English School, the name of Gainsborough will be transmitted to posterity, in the history of the art, among the very first of that rising name.’ So wrote, in his Fourteenth Discourse, Sir Joshua Reynolds—a lover of pomp and ceremony even in the art of Literature—doing therein ‘untimely justice’ to the merits of his contemporary, whom he survived. Since then the English School, whose separate existence this accomplished admirer of the Roman and the Bolognese did but doubtfully and modestly look forward to, has become an accomplished fact, and all but a hundred years after his death, ‘the talents of the late Mr. Gainsborough’ are honoured at the Grosvenor Gallery. In the two large rooms and in the vestibule there are to-day exhibited about a couple of hundred pieces from his brush; the great SirJoshua Exhibition of last winter is felt to be successfully rivalled; and an opportunity is given to the student to perceive the range, the flexibility, the spontaneity of Gainsborough’s art.
Gainsborough, like any other distinct individuality in Art or Letters, is best understood when he is taken simply on his merits, without reference to other personalities who happened to be of his time. To institute a perpetual comparison between him and Sir Joshua is to make the sterile blunder that is made when Dickens is pitted against Thackeray, the epic ofCopperfieldagainst the satire ofVanity Fair. In each case it was only accident that brought the men into juxtaposition; and as regards Gainsborough, it is rather with Velasquez or Vandyke, or with some French Eighteenth Century Master of familiar grace, that we should compare him. These were his kindred, with these he had something in common, as the Romans, the Bolognese, and sometimes the Venetians, were the kindred of Sir Joshua. And yet, to a certain extent, comparison between Gainsborough and Sir Joshua is even now unavoidable. Living at the same period and in the same great town, painting the same people, and—save for the briefer apparition of Romney—dividing between them, though dividing unequally, the applause ofpolite Society, that choice which the men of their time had to make of one of them, has still to a certain extent to be made by us. Often, of course, we are liberated from the necessity of any such narrow alternative; but when we look at the portraits, by the two artists, of Johnson, Garrick, Mrs. Siddons, the characteristics of each—what each lacked and what each brought to the accomplishment of his task—cannot but suggest themselves. And it will then be apparent that Reynolds painted with a more obvious learning, Gainsborough with a more spontaneous grace; Reynolds often with a more determined adherence to the particular character, Gainsborough with a keener enjoyment of the suggestions that character afforded for translating a sometimes uncouth nature into an exquisite art. Take, for instance, the two portraits of Mrs. Siddons: the learning and tradition of the Schools, the disposition towards a dignity that may be well-nigh pompous, are in Sir Joshua’s ‘Tragic Muse’; the spontaneous grace, the disposition towards simplicity are in the Mrs. Siddons of Gainsborough. Further, again, to compare the portraits of Dr. Johnson by Sir Joshua with that one by Gainsborough at the Grosvenor Gallery, is to see that here is an instance in which the fidelity—the unflattering fidelity—is on Reynolds’side, and the idealisation on Gainsborough’s. Yet it is hardly needful to declare of so great a man as Gainsborough that he never idealised merely that he might flatter. He idealised because his vision of the world was bound to be poetic. He was a poet above all things. The ideal was his atmosphere. But Sir Joshua, with all his accomplishments, lived with the prose of the world, and, as a rule, was but in vain ambitious to reach to its poetry.
The poetic character of Gainsborough’s mind and work is, then, the first thing to be realised, if we are to understand his pictures. For otherwise we shall be offended at exaggerations and astonished at suppressions, both of which are the result of a method he adopted in obedience to his temperament, which combined, of course, a gentle and genuine love of Nature with a consuming thirst to see that Nature was never deprived of the assistance of Art. Gainsborough has been written of as the earliest Master of Naturalism—save, indeed, Hogarth—in the English School. Nor is the description untrue; in the sense that he sought his inspiration from Nature, instead of from academies, and that his landscape had more than a suggestion of Suffolk or of Somerset. Yet Morland carried Naturalism much further than Gainsborough, and Constable much further thanMorland. Gainsborough was never a mere copyist of Nature. From the first he composed and arranged, but his artifices were seldom very apparent, and his control over actual form—his artistic modification of it—was gentle and tempered, and this is most of all made evident by the display of his Landscape. With the permanent exhibition at the National Gallery and the annually recurring winter shows at Burlington House, no one of course has any need to be ignorant of the fact that one of the most fascinating of the painters of portraits was also a landscape painter. But the display at the Grosvenor Gallery will bring home to people a truth some may have overlooked, because at the Grosvenor Gallery Gainsborough’s range in landscape work is seen to have been extensive. No single early painting there, indeed, can claim to be quite the equal of the ‘Great Cornard’ picture in Trafalgar Square, but the paintings are so many, and the subjects so varied, that the impression they produce must be great. In the East Room, the smaller room, are some of the most interesting of these landscapes. There—to begin with only a minor example—is the ‘Landscape with Figures against a Tree’: one of the very few dated pictures. It is of the year 1775, or just about the time that the painter left Bath for London. Itis interesting as seeming to belong to an earlier period, as carrying on to a time when most of his work had changed character, the features of his more youthful work. It is a bit of every day English scenery, accepted for what it is, with a tolerance of the commonplace rare with him, indeed in any day, but, as one would have thought, quite impossible to his later life. Here, too, is one of his few failures to attain what was really beautiful, ‘A Landscape with Cows,’ lent by the trustees of the Duke of Newcastle—an artificial scene of blue distance and of hot and ‘unconvincing’ foreground. ‘A View in Shropshire’ is in character not less classical, not less suggestive of Claude, but it is far more successful. The foreground is of wooded country, brown and gold; behind it, a richly illuminated champaign ends abruptly in a conical hill, which is the Wrekin beheld in the light of a selected hour. The Catalogue of the Exhibition—full of industriously compiled detail and of quaint anecdote, carefully burrowed for in half-forgotten places—might, perhaps, have chronicled the fact that the great picture we are speaking of is repeated, feature by feature, in another. But this other happens to be hung so high that its merits we can hardly estimate. Its pedigree, however, is unimpeachable. The little ‘Landscape with HorsesPloughing’ recalls, in the disposition of its objects, Turner’s ‘Windmill and Lock,’ and Turner, who was never above taking suggestions—who took them from every one—may possibly have seen it. Lord Bateman’s ‘Boys and Fighting Dogs,’ though by no means among the most attractive things, is at least memorable. It shares with several other pictures the business of proving that as a draughtsman of animals—certainly as a draughtsman of dogs—Gainsborough had few rivals; and it is one of the rare instances of Gainsborough’s painting what is properly called a subject picture—a picture in which the portrayal of an incident has been the first care. Furthermore, the boys here—like that uncouth child, ‘Jack Hill, in a Cottage’—are, at all events, perfectly natural examples of everyday folk. Generally his cottage urchins, though they have rustic grace and rustic wildness, though they roll on the greensward and dabble in the brook, are not profound studies of a real peasantry; and, though Leslie indeed said of the ‘Girl with a Pitcher’ that nothing more beautiful had ever been painted, we may remember that this lavish appreciation by a brother artist who was invariably generous was bestowed at a time when the graver aspects of the peasant’s life had, as far as pictorial art is concerned, been mirroredonly in the art of Turner. The student of to-day, the student of Millet, can hardly single out for truthfulness, though he can always single out for grace, the rustics of Gainsborough. Into the realities of peasant life, Gainsborough scarcely even essayed to have any deep entrance.
The large ‘View at the Mouth of the Thames’ is one of the most realistic, one of the least poetic, of Gainsborough’s pictures. It is an instance of how well this curiously flexible genius could at need perform that which somebody else could still perform much better. And if it had not to be remembered that Collins and Turner came after Gainsborough, instead of before him, we should say the same about the Duke of Westminster’s ‘Coast Scene.’ Here a sea that has only enough of movement to give it vivacity and sparkle, runs up to a narrow breadth of beach, behind which a cliff rises. Three figures are on the beach—a group of country or of fisher folk; a man kneeling by a basket hands up a fish, to be inspected by two girls, who bend towards him. The inspiration of an ancient master and some concession to ancient traditions are discernible in the umber and golden shores of another piece. It is in the ‘River Scene with Cattle’ that Gainsborough is more characteristic; it is there that he delights us in fullmeasure with that which is his own. The scene is at a ferry somewhere in the Eastern Counties, where the stream is wide, the land large and flat, the sky ample, the horizon infinite. At the edge of a miniature cliff, stands a group of cattle. Below them are figures in shadow, and from the water, to the right, rise high into the sky the tall and narrow sails of two fishing-smacks drawn up together. Here the scene is an everyday place, but Gainsborough has known how to choose the hour; his selection of objects has been justified by a fortunate grouping; he has secured a rhythm of line second only to that which lies at the service of a subtle draughtsman of the figure or a great Ornamentist; and the hues of silvery blue and golden grey with which his picture is flooded, are those that gather only on the palette of a born colourist. When this picture has been adequately seen, and its calm radiance appreciated, the student has little need to go further to find what Gainsborough was as a poetical recorder of earth and sky, and what as a pure painter. But for variety’s sake, and for the sake of noting how much Gainsborough saw for himself, and how much he was influenced, too, by the ways in which predecessors as different from each other as Hobbema and Cuyp had seen the world and presented it, it is well tolook carefully at some of the smaller landscapes in the other and larger room. There are, perhaps, especially the ‘Small Landscape,’ with luminous white clouds, remote in a lofty sky; the ‘Forest Scene,’ and the unfinished sketch, in which Gainsborough has given to a little group of gypsies and their beasts a greater dignity than a Fleming could have bestowed on a Flight into Egypt. There are, of course, larger works not claiming less attention; and one and all, by their deficiencies as well as by their merits, show that the greatness or the general attractiveness of Gainsborough as a landscape painter is due not much to his naturalism—which was naturalism only in his own day, and is seen to have been almost idealism in ours. His greatness as a landscape painter consists much more in his continual endowment of Nature with the grace and magic of Style.
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In Portraiture, the only failing that can be laid to Gainsborough’s charge—and it may at times be a serious one—is that he was apt to be less impressed by individuality of character than by the occasion which his subject presented for the painter’s triumph in brush-work. Facile observer as he was, and wonderful draughtsman, it was not often that hebraced himself to such an effort of stern realism as was made in the portrait of ‘Judge Skinner.’ This light of the law, sitting robed—with the keen, sagacious face perfectly dominant over all the splendour of attire—was painted (on the canvas of which we are now speaking) for Christ Church, Oxford, of which in 1742 he had been a student; but the Grosvenor Gallery contains another, though a less admirable, presentment of the same person. This, though inferior, comes likewise from an unimpeachable quarter—it is lent by the Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn. Of portraits of William Pitt, there are several by Gainsborough; but his best representation of all, of the young man who governed England, is that which comes, like the second portrait of Skinner, from Lincoln’s Inn. The natural charm of the model here accorded with that which was the frequent preoccupation of Gainsborough’s art, and sincere must have been the painter’s pleasure in dealing with a face which—like the face of Dickens in his youth, two generations later—expressed sweetness with firmness, and placidity with boundlessness of resource. The portrait of ‘David Garrick’ is less satisfactory as an effort of craftsmanship. The shrewd little lady who succeeded the great and genial PegWoffington in Garrick’s love, declared that it was the ‘best portrait ever painted of her Davy,’ so we will not attempt to dispute the excellence of the likeness; but the thought that inspired the composition was comparatively trivial and commonplace. In a park-like scene, the background somewhat suggestive of Garrick’s favourite retreat at Hampton, the actor whose attentions were wont to be divided between the Tragic and the Comic Muse—as Sir Joshua has expressed so suggestively in his happy allegory—stands by a pedestal on which is placed the bust of Shakespeare, and Garrick has his arm round the bust, and almost familiarly caresses it. More valuable would have been a picture in which the head of the actor had been more dominant than thedégagégesture. The head of Garrick, however, if the story goes truly, was always a puzzle to Gainsborough. Of Garrick and of Foote—mobile comedians, baffling beyond all men—he is said to have exclaimed, when he essayed to paint them, ‘Rot them for a couple of rogues, they have everybody’s faces but their own.’
Generally, it may be noted, the full-lengths of men—sometimes, also, the full-lengths of women—are less attractive than the half-lengths and the busts, though whatever could be done by any artistto overcome the difficulty of making the full-length interesting, could be done by Gainsborough, since he was a master of draperies, and skilled, as a pupil of Gravelot’s should have been, in the secrets of dignified and gracious carriage. But, to remain for the moment with the men’s portraits, one’s admiration of the elegance and harmony of Tenducci’s portrait must be in excess of any feeling that can rightly be prompted by the ‘Garrick.’ This, again, is the portrait of an artist—Gainsborough’s sympathies were with artists—and Tenducci is said to have ‘warbled so divinely.’ And then, to take an instance from the women’s portraits, and to single out a full-length figure, in which the face is modelled with exceptional exactness, and is one, too, of peculiar refinement, take the portrait of Lady Sheffield, with her aquiline nose and her almond-shaped eyes—even here the importance of the countenance is a little effaced by the brilliant light on the showy drapery of the skirt. No one could assert that, for real charm, that picture—masterly as it is in its own kind—is equal to any one of half a dozen busts or half-lengths in the same Gallery. But, on the other hand, the ‘Sir Bate Dudley,’ ‘skilled in the nice conduct of a clouded cane,’ is an instance of Gainsborough’s occasional triumph, even with the full-length malefigure; and the ‘Mrs. Graham,’ at Edinburgh, is one of the most fascinating full-length portraits of a woman that has been painted since the days of the Venetians. Furthermore, three more quite masterly full-length male portraits are in the Grosvenor Gallery itself: they are first, those that are lent by the Queen, the portrait of Colonel St. Leger, the portrait of ‘Fischer’ the musician, and last, the familiar ‘Blue Boy,’ a work directed possibly at the theories of Sir Joshua and inspired by the practice of Van Dyck.
As one looks over the subjects of Gainsborough’s portraits, one understands in part how it was that, comparing them with Sir Joshua’s, or perhaps even with Romney’s, so few of them were engraved. Romney was, above all things, seductive: he saw Lady Hamilton—or when not Lady Hamilton, then some one who was almost equally pretty—in everything, and the public liked what he saw. Sir Joshua was a courtier, careful to be on the best of terms with the great world. Gainsborough courted nobody, and the world talked much less about him. Though, after the lapse of years, he succeeded in getting a hundred guineas for a full-length picture, and moved, without imprudence, from the cottage at Ipswich, rented at six pounds, first to the Circusat Bath, and then to the west wing of Schomberg House, Pall Mall, he was never really in his own time Sir Joshua’s rival in the public favour. And much of his best work in Portraiture—over and above that work in landscape which confessedly engaged his choice—was devoted to the record of people of the artistic rather than the fashionable world; people of professions the members of which were not in those days motioned to the velvet of the social sward.
We have already spoken of more than one instance—and ‘Giardini,’ the fiddler, is another—of such a natural selection which governs Gainsborough’s art. It is as characteristic of him in portraiture as it is of Watteau ingenrepieces and gallant pastorals. But there is a little canvas, the portrait of an unknown Mrs. Carr, which holds its own either against portraits of people from the artistic world or people from Georgian ‘Society.’ It is curiously natural and refined in expression, exquisitely suggestive of elegant carriage, though so small a portion of the figure is seen, and as a piece of flesh-painting, it is unsurpassed by any of the more famous examples of Gainsborough’s skill. Who was ‘Mrs. Carr’? And had Gainsborough, we may wonder, some further interest in her than that which is aroused inany qualified observer of Humanity by the vision of such agreeable beauty? For Gainsborough, as a rule, painted best the models he knew the most. Executing every touch with his own hand, and doing his most picturesque with every model because he was so essentially artistic, he yet must have undertaken many a portrait of fashionable persons or of enrichedbourgeois, into the dull recesses of whose character he did not care to penetrate. Where he knew and liked, he painted with delight. He was so profoundly impressionable: what he enjoyed stirred him: if somebody played the fiddle particularly well, tears of rapture stood on Gainsborough’s cheek.
His wife, who was in her youth a rose and brown coloured beauty, and whose countenance was long afterwards lustrous enough under the becoming grey of her powdered hair, Gainsborough painted several times, and always with distinction and conspicuous artistry. His handling of the subject is best in the portrait numbered 175—a worthy companion to his own sensitive and high-bred countenance (No. 185). And his portraits of his daughters—his only children—are at the least satisfying. One is a group—the two together; another is a half-length of Mrs. Fischer; another, again, a half-length of the brighter personality who remained ‘Miss Gainsborough.’There is some likeness between the two young women, in the general contour of the head and in the fulness of the under-lip. ‘Miss Gainsborough,’ with her clear brown eyes, delicate eyebrows, compact and intelligent forehead, is the greater beauty; but to Mrs. Fischer there belongs a winning expression of pathetic reverie. Both are felt to be the true daughters of their father: the one by her possession of the gaiety and fire of temper which characterised Gainsborough in his happiest times; the other by her obvious inheritance of what proved more than her share of Gainsborough’s keen perception of the sadness of so much of human fortune. Sir Joshua Reynolds, who was almost wholly intellectual and ‘practical,’ who lived on the outside of things, had nothing of Gainsborough’s sense of profundity and pathos. And, in so far as he had nothing of this, he was, in the essentials of character, the less of an artist. For Goethe said—and when he said it he was uttering one of the deepest of his truths—‘To be artistic is to be serious.’
(The Standard, 1st and 6th January 1885.)