Laureate of the Ruling Classes

By ROBERT HUGHES

In London, a delightful retrospective of Gainsborough

Thomas Gainsborough was the most popular portraitist in 18th century England, and the English still love him: in every way, the big Gainsborough retrospective now on view at London's Tate Gallery is a ceremony of national taste. Organized by Art Historian John Hayes, it traces Gainsborough's career from his beginnings as apprentice painter of homespun Suffolk dignitaries to his apotheosis as the most popular and sought-after portraitist of the Georgian ruling classes. There are more than 150 paintings and drawings, although some of his best-known work--like the Blue Boy, or the exquisite portrait, Mr. and Mrs. Robert Andrews, in the National Gallery, London--has not been included. It is a delightful show, and thoroughly accessible.

It would be hard for any but the most committed Gainsborough enthusiast (and they exist) to rank him equal to those two pillars of English vision, John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. He did not have Constable's deep, poetic curiosity about the facts of landscape; still less did he rise to Turner's heights of sublimity or audacity of color. But both painters admired him. "Soothing, tender and affecting," Constable called Gainsborough's landscapes. "His object was to deliver a fine sentiment, and he has fully accomplished it ... The stillness of noon, the depths of twilight, and the dews and pearls of the morning, are all to be found on the | canvases of this most benevolent and kindhearted man. On looking at them, we find tears in our eyes, and know not what brings them."

By temperament Gainsborough I was an ideal society portraitist. "His conversation was sprightly, but licentious," one of his friends remembered. "The common topics, or any of a superior cast, he thoroughly hated, and always interrupted by some stroke of wit or humour ... so far from writing, [he] scarcely ever read a book--but, for a letter to an intimate friend, he had few equals." He loved music, and entertained his friends by playing the harpsichord and the viola da gamba. "Liberal, thoughtless, and dissipated," he called himself, and admired (without particularly envying it) the application of sturdier and more evenminded talents like that of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the president of the Royal Academy. "Painting & Punctuality mix like Oil & Vinegar," he reflected.

Effervescent, mildly rakish and not given to introspection, Gainsborough was a far cry from the intractability of other, more intense painters: he possessed, to a fault, the knack of not threatening the client, either by critical insight or expressive force. When he settled in Bath in 1759, he was determined to be the mirror of the upper 5% of England, the gratin who came there to take the waters, exchange scandal in the Pump Room and pursue their intrigues, sexual and fiscal, in the ambit of the great country houses of Wiltshire and Somerset. This was not a vocation for a social critic. Gainsborough completely shared the values of the class he depicted. If that made his portraits a little monotonous in social tone, it helped save them from the hateful obsequiousness of modern society painting. For Gainsborough was his own man: not a grand one, but not a toady or a leech either. "Damn Gentlemen," he once wrote. "There is not such a set of Enemies, to a real Artist, in the world as they are ... But I, who blow away all the chaff & by G-- in their Eyes too if they dont stand clear, know that they have but one part worth looking at, and that is their Purse."

Before Bath, there is an innocence to Gainsborough's portraits that occasionally looks almost spectral: the early figures of Heneage Lloyd and His Sister, round-eyed adolescents in a rococo garden, look like large pale dolls haunting an artificial landscape. Confidence came with his absorption of the grand manner. With access to the big houses, the young painter could see the work of Rubens, Van Dyck and Claude. He rapidly learned to deal with the social mask. Those pink, smooth, patrician egg faces, the men a little knobbly of jaw and hooded of eyelid, with their "cold pleasant stares" (as Henry James would say of the English gentleman) are emblems of sensibility and composure, not of emotion. Now and again a very slight hint of irony seems to intrude, but one may be fairly sure that one's own 20th century ideas, not Gainsborough's 18th century intentions, place it there.

Certain paintings of Gainsborough's seem to condense a social essence, suggesting what one can only call a poetry of ownership. His marriage portrait of William and Elizabeth Hallett, 1785, usually known as The Morning Walk, is one of these: two peach-skinned 21-year-olds, dressed to the nines in their formal finery of velvet, taffeta, filmy silk and crisp ribbons, adored by the animal kingdom in the shape of a fluffy white dog (whose exuberant coat mimicks the finesse of his mistress's clothes), strolling in their idealized park. Its rhymes between nature and culture--particularly in the similarity between Gainsborough's handling of the wife's gauzes and of the foliage of the background trees --suggest an unforced series of transitions from the human to the vegetable realms: nature is as much the Halletts' accomplice as their tailor, dressmaker or gardener.

Few English artists offer as many of the paradoxes inherent in 18th century ideas of "nature" and "artifice" as Gainsborough. We know--as the 18th century audience knew much more intimately--that people did not look so sweet as they do in Gainsborough. No doubt they worried, and suffered from fear and loathing; their teeth hurt; they rarely washed, and stank like stoats in rut. Their judicial representatives hanged poachers, and sent penniless old women in chains to Botany Bay for stealing five pounds of cheese. But none of this was the business of painting, and Gainsborough's portraits have the same truth-by-artifice as opera--although, by comparison with his undeviating social equanimity, The Marriage of Figaro almost looks like a Marxist tract.

Sometimes portraiture bored him, and then Gainsborough turned to landscape, his main love. Almost from the start of his career he had turned out exquisitely fresh images of the countryside, showing Dutch influence (from 17th century artists like Ruisdael or Van Goyen) in their clear construction, but infused with a pale, precisely observed tonality that was wholly Gainsborough's own. One of the key early works, in this regard, was the Landscape with Sand Pit of 1746-47. "Landskip" was always Arcadian. "I'm sick of portraits," Gainsborough said, "and wish very much to take my viola da gamba and walk off to some sweet village where I can paint landskips and enjoy the fag end of life in quietness and ease."

Gainsborough's drawings reveal his close studies of nature, but from his mid-30s onward he came to rely more and more on conventionalized signs. The feathery, diaphanous trees, the undergrowth brown as a fiddle, the cunning mirror flashes of lake and stream are the standard components, fitted gracefully together. One is not surprised to learn that he used to design his landscapes from models on a table.

"He would place cork or coal for his foregrounds," one of his friends remembered, "make middle grounds of sand and clay, bushes of mosses and lichens, and set up distant woods of broccoli."

In the same spirit, Gainsborough conventionalized his country genre scenes. Everything in them is designed to be seen from the landlord's eyeline.

It would not have been agreeable to hang truthful accounts of English peasant life in the drawing room: too much dirt and rickets. Hence the popularity of Gainsborough's bonny rural babes, sturdy swains and homespun nymphs, as fictive as any pastoral by Pope (but without the irony that goes with Augustan classicism). Such creatures could never burn a rick or post a threatening scrawl on a gate. They were outside history, forever.

One reason why Gainsborough's formal portraits still look more convincing than his genre scenes may be that they, unlike the latter, correspond to how their subjects saw themselves: there is some mutual connection between the facts of aristocracy and Gainsborough's visual language, in its decorum and its peculiarly English sense of the "natural." Today, that world seems as remote as the moon. Nor does it seem a mere accident that Gainsborough should have died in 1788, the year before the French Revolution shook the Arcadia of property he had painted for four decades, and whose laureate he was.

--By Robert Hughes

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