Gainsborough at the Grosvenor Gallery

Gainsborough at the Grosvenor Gallery

Frederick Wedmore's piece reviews a Gainsborough exhibition of about two hundred works at the Grosvenor Gallery, following the previous winter's Reynolds exhibition. It opens by quoting Sir Joshua Reynolds's Fourteenth Discourse, in which Reynolds predicted Gainsborough would rank among the first names of any future English School, and notes that this prediction has since been fulfilled. Wedmore argues Gainsborough should be judged on his own merits rather than constantly measured against Reynolds, comparing the pairing to the sterile habit of pitting Dickens against Thackeray. He suggests Gainsborough's truer kinship is with Velasquez, Vandyke, or French eighteenth-century masters of familiar grace. Still, since both painted the same sitters in the same era, some comparison is unavoidable: looking at their respective portraits of Johnson, Garrick, and Mrs. Siddons shows Reynolds painting with more obvious learning and dignity, Gainsborough with more spontaneous grace. In the Siddons portraits, Reynolds's "Tragic Muse" shows the learning of the Schools while Gainsborough's version shows simplicity. In the Johnson portraits, fidelity belongs to Reynolds and idealisation to Gainsborough, because Gainsborough's vision of the world was inherently poetic. Wedmore calls Gainsborough, after Hogarth, an early master of naturalism in the English School, drawing on Suffolk and Somerset scenery rather than academic models, though later naturalists like Morland and Constable carried naturalism further. He surveys landscapes at the exhibition: the dated 1775 "Landscape with Figures against a Tree," painted around when Gainsborough left Bath for London; "A Landscape with Cows," lent by the trustees of the Duke of Newcastle, judged an unconvincing failure; "A View in Shropshire," showing the Wrekin, judged more successful and Claude-like; a repeated version of this view hung too high to assess; "Landscape with Horses Ploughing," compared to Turner's "Windmill and Lock"; Lord Bateman's "Boys and Fighting Dogs," noted for its dog draughtsmanship; "Jack Hill, in a Cottage" and the "Girl with a Pitcher," the latter praised by Leslie though Wedmore finds Gainsborough's rustics graceful rather than truthful compared to Millet's; the large "View at the Mouth of the Thames," called realistic but unpoetic; the Duke of Westminster's "Coast Scene," with fisherfolk on a beach; and the "River Scene with Cattle," set at a ferry in the Eastern Counties, which Wedmore singles out as most characteristic of Gainsborough's gift for color and composition. He also mentions smaller landscapes including a "Small Landscape" with luminous clouds, a "Forest Scene," and an unfinished sketch of gypsies, noting the influence of Hobbema and Cuyp, and concludes Gainsborough's landscape greatness lies in endowing nature with style rather than pure naturalism. Turning to portraiture, Wedmore identifies Gainsborough's chief weakness as caring more for painterly occasion than individual character. He discusses the stern "Judge Skinner" portrait painted for Christ Church, Oxford, and a second, lesser version lent by Lincoln's Inn, which also lent a fine portrait of the young William Pitt. He finds the "David Garrick" portrait, showing Garrick with his arm around a bust of Shakespeare in a Hampton-like park setting, less satisfying as craftsmanship despite being called the best likeness by a contemporary lady; he recounts Gainsborough's complaint that Garrick and Foote had "everybody's faces but their own." He praises the Tenducci portrait's elegance, the Lady Sheffield full-length despite its showy drapery, the "Sir Bate Dudley," the Edinburgh "Mrs. Graham," and three royal-lent full-lengths at the Gallery: Colonel St. Leger, "Fischer" the musician, and the "Blue Boy," the last possibly responding to Reynolds's theories and Van Dyck's practice. Wedmore notes Gainsborough was engraved less often than Reynolds or Romney because he courted artistic and professional sitters rather than fashionable society, citing "Giardini" the fiddler and the unknown "Mrs. Carr," whose small portrait he praises highly as flesh-painting. He recounts Gainsborough's modest early fortunes, from the six-pound cottage at Ipswich to the Circus at Bath and Schomberg House, Pall Mall. He closes by discussing Gainsborough's portraits of his wife (numbered 175, alongside his own self-portrait numbered 185) and his two daughters, comparing "Miss Gainsborough," the greater beauty with clear brown eyes, to Mrs. Fischer's pathetic reverie, and contrasts Reynolds's intellectual, practical outlook with Gainsborough's deeper sense of sadness and pathos, quoting Goethe's dictum that "to be artistic is to be serious."

By Frederick Wedmore · First published 1899 · Genre: Art Criticism, Exhibition Review, Essay · 4,265 words

First lines

‘If ever 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 Sir Joshua 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.

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art criticism · exhibition review · portrait painting · landscape painting · Gainsborough · Sir Joshua Reynolds · English art · eighteenth-century painting · artistic grace · poetic imagination · naturalism in art · artistic idealization

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