Thomas Gainsborough

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

 The Guardian, Saturday October 19, 2002

The hidden story

Sexuality, class, poverty, politics: Thomas Gainsborough's work
encompassed the lot, brushing as close to the bone as he might dare. And
it is this, says Jonathan Jones, that makes the 18th-century artist a
modern genius

Perdita - "the lost one" - sits in a mossy bower, on an earth ledge,
alone except for her loyal Pomeranian dog. In her hand she holds a
locket, opened to reveal the blurred face of George, Prince of Wales,
who commissioned Thomas Gainsborough's portrait of his lover in 1781.
(http://www.abcgallery.com/G/gainsborough/gainsborough33.html)

Mary Robinson - nicknamed Perdita after her performance in The Winter's
Tale at Drury Lane Theatre - was one of those self-invented individuals
who made 18th-century Britain such an effervescent, commercial, cynical,
corrupt, celebrity-conscious, shallow, competitive, socially mobile,
dangerous place - a mirror of ourselves. Raised in seedy circumstances,
she married one Thomas Robinson when she was 15. Within months, Thomas
was imprisoned for debt and Mary had to fend for herself with three
talents - for poetry, acting and sex.

Her first book of poems was published in 1775. Her performing skills
were noticed by the actor and theatre manager David Garrick. But it was
her beauty, her way of carrying herself - she always had "a sort of
dignified air", she said - that got her a string of male friends eager
to help, libertines such as the politician Charles James Fox and
playwright and manager of the Drury Lane Theatre, Richard Brinsley
Sheridan.

When the love affair between Perdita and the Prince of Wales became
public in 1780, she was the talk of the town - satirised in prints,
gossiped about in Vauxhall Gardens and St James's Park; she quit the
stage, threw away a promising career for her new role as royal mistress.
And yet by the time George commissioned Gainsborough to paint her
portrait, the affair was over - he had a new fling, and Perdita had lost
everything: her acting career was wrecked, she was massively in debt and
soon to be bounced between a string of high-profile lovers.

Thomas Gainsborough, the artist who loved women, was the man to paint
Perdita. Uninhibited about the eroticism of his culture, and at the same
time someone with a heart, he was her perfect myth-maker. Not that he
didn't have competition; she posed for all three of the leading portrait
artists of the day - the slightly cheaper George Romney, then
Gainsborough, then the most prestigious of all, Sir Joshua Reynolds,
president of the Royal Academy. All three portraits hang today in the
Wallace Collection in London, but Gainsborough's is in a class of its
own. He communicates what her story was about - desire, glamour and loss.

It's a strange, heady painting. She looks drugged, ecstatic, disengaged
from the real, transported into a realm of fantasy. You have to look for
only a few seconds to realise that this is not a realistic painting of a
woman in a landscape; the trees and grass do not even attempt to imitate
appearances. They are dream images - the trees have a deliciously light
blue, sketchy quality, as if painted on silk, and the canopy of foliage
around Perdita forms itself, as if by magic, into a natural enclosure.
Nature has moulded itself to the shape of her feeling. It enfolds and
decorates her, amplifies her thoughts. This is a modern painting, if the
definition of modern art is that it acknowledges the subjective emotions
of the artist rather than claiming to present eternal facts.
Gainsborough's rival, Sir Joshua Reynolds, was a champion of permanent,
classical values. Gainsborough was the opposite. He painted contingent,
ephemeral pleasures - the shimmering stuff of Perdita's skirts, the blue
ribbon over her creamy chest.

Gainsborough longs for Perdita and in doing so, does something
chivalrous - he paints on behalf of Mary Robinson rather than fulfilling
the requirements of her ex-lover. George wanted the picture as a
souvenir of his grand amour; a trophy to hang on the wall. But instead
of giving him Mrs Robinson stuffed and mounted, Gainsborough dramatises
her beauty, sensitivity, sexuality, expressing his own feelings about
her and offering the prince visual evidence that he has made a mistake
in casting her off. You idiot, Your Highness, is the painting's message.

(clip)

This was Gainsborough's world. These were the people he knew. Sometimes
Gainsborough's account of his world seems so naked, so acute, that you
can't quite believe he painted the way he did and got away with it. Some
people won't believe it and refuse to accept that there is anything odd,
anything satirical, about Gainsborough's early portrait Mr And Mrs
Andrews, of a landed couple on their estate just outside his home town,
Sudbury.

(http://www.hearts-ease.org/cgi-bin/gallery_work.cgi?ID=20&work=4)

Gainsborough's early style - crisply precise, coolly informative - has a
pop art immediacy; he pulls no punches. Mr Robert Andrews, a landed
gentleman, is a blunt, aggressive figure; he holds a menacing shotgun.
He's been hunting, but looks as if he'd shoot a poacher as happily as a
rabbit. His young wife, Frances Mary Carter, is dressed inappropriately
for the East Anglian outdoors; her skirt billows comically against the
cold, fresh, wet sky. The landscape is perfect in its British toughness
and cloudy beauty - and is explicitly a farmed, enclosed estate.

It was the Marxist art critic John Berger who established this painting
as a contemporary icon in his 1970s TV series Ways Of Seeing. Mr and Mrs
Andrews, he noticed, "are not a couple in nature as Rousseau imagined
nature. They are landowners and their proprietary attitude towards what
surrounds them is visible in their stance and expressions."

Some scholars can't reconcile this hard political language with the
extreme loveliness of Gainsborough's little blue and green treasure of a
painting; such a tender, loving landscape, a deeply personal record of
the countryside in which he grew up. But Gainsborough's painting is
edgy, composed so as to question the relationship of figure and
landscape. He shoves his subjects to the side; they are at odds with,
rather than part of, the land and sky sweeping away from them. In their
posh clothes, they look artificial, unconvincing.

Gainsborough hated rich clients. His letters are full of loathing for
the "gentlemen" who came to his studio expecting him to pay court, to
flatter, to play the servant. "They think (and so may you for a while)
that they reward your merit by their company and notice," he advised a
friend, "but I know that they have only one part worth looking at, and
that is their purse." He gave his servant orders to ask any gentlemen
who came to his house what they desired of Mr Gainsborough; if they
wanted to commission a portrait, they were to be let in, but if they
just wanted to talk to the celebrity artist and boast about their Grand
Tour and whatnot, the servant was to send them packing. "Now if a Lady a
handsome Lady comes 'tis as much as his Life is worth to send them away
so."

His greatest portraits are the ones in which he celebrates something
different from the run-of-the-mill gentleman. They are paintings of the
flotsam and jetsam of 18th-century society, ladies of dubious
reputation, musicians and artists who made an insecure living, the crazy
inventors and people he admired for private reasons, such as the doctors
who helped him with his lifelong ailments and illnesses which he picked
up (or thought he picked up) when meeting "venuses" in London brothels.

full: http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,814765,00.html

--

Louis Proyect
www.marxmail.org



~~~~~~~
PLEASE clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.