Gainsborough at the Grosvenor Gallery

‘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.

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 of _Copperfield_ against the satire of _Vanity 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 of polite 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.