Thomas Gainsborough

Gainsborough’s mature portraits follow Van Dyck in their stylish elegance but like his landscapes are executed in a much looser more ethereal technique which descends from French painting and the work of Watteau (1684–1721) and his successors. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Gainsborough’s popularity among collectors rose through acquisitions by the Rothschilds and the new American plutocracy.

Gainsborough was born in Suffolk and in 1740 left for London where he studied with the engraver Hubert Gravelot (1699–1773) and got to know Hogarth (1697–1764). Returning to Suffolk, he moved to the larger town of Ipswich. There he found a bigger clientele for his portraits, but his landscapes remained harder to sell. His best-known painting of this time is Mr. and Mrs. Andrews (National Gallery, London) shown against a richly colored and prosperous English landscape. The incisive draftsmanship of the sitters and even their coy charm is Hogarthian and the focus on the crops hints at Robert Andrew’s interest in progressive agriculture. At this time Gainsborough painted one of his first pure landscapes, the so-called Gainsborough’s Forest (National Gallery, London), in the manner of the Dutch seventeenth-century artist Jacob van Ruisdael (1628–82). In 1759, he moved to the spa town of Bath where he studied Van Dyck (1599–1641) and attracted more fashionable sitters. His Mrs. Thicknesse (Cincinnati Art Museum, Cincinnati), painted soon after his arrival, is a most elegant performance in the Van Dyck manner and executed with a virtuosity of technique unmatched in England at the time. Another Bath painting is the famous Blue Boy, a life-size portrait of Jonathan Buttle, son of a hardware merchant, dressed in Van Dyck style costume. It has always been regarded as an iconic work and was acquired in the twentieth century by the California railway king Henry Huntington.