4. Molly and the Captain
Molly and the Captain, five and three, were out chasing cabbage whites. Their father the painter watched them scamper and shout. There were days when this is all Gainsborough wanted to do: sit with his back propped against a wall or a rock and sketch the girls bounding about; filling his book with leaping lines. In his studio, pursuing likenesses and money, stillness and decorum perforce had to reign, the sitters frozen in their chosen attitudes of importance and he the faithful transcriber of their self-regarding ambition. What Thomas Gainsborough really respected was nature. There was no shortage of face-painters in England now, not even in Suffolk, but few who captured the real nature of the persons, much less the character of the country. To bring those two things together: to paint the figures in a true landskip, not some fanciful pastoral glade, that was the thing. Mr and Mrs Andrews had liked it well enough when he had pictured them at the edge of one of their enclosed fields of ripening wheat, hound and gun, land put to profitable use. But there was, he discovered, a limited taste for this kind of propertied pastoral. It was the patrons who wanted portraits done in high style, coat and gown, wig and pearls, who kept the wolf from his door, and so he must oblige.
But when Gainsborough took time to picture his ‘dear girls’, his hand, following his heart, could skip a little. Yet the subject was not trifling. Looking at Mary and Margaret chase a butterfly, Gainsborough was smitten by poignant illumination; reminded perhaps of a page of John Bunyan’s a century before where a similar scene had made an emblem for pleasures as fleeting as the lifespan of the pretty insect. But although Gainsborough had had the kind of Dissenter upbringing in which such homilies were instructional bread and milk, he was not, by nature, a sententious artist. It was not the commonplace of the world’s transient vanities that was the weighty undertow of his painting so much as the fugitive moment of the girls’ lives: the airy sweetness of their play, which could no more be held still than the elusive butterfly. Trap the beating wings of the instant and spontaneity would die.
Especially before Dr Jenner’s vaccine had been introduced, small children perished with terrible regularity. Smallpox and scarlet fever carried them off. Mortality was especially high in London, where Gainsborough’s first child, Mary, had been born. His wife, Margaret Burr, had been carrying her when they married in 1748. He had come to the city from Sudbury to make the most of his talent; studied at Hogarth’s academy; tried to find a dependable batch of sitters; but could never get established. The baby died; his fortunes withered on the vine. It may have been his wife who resolved they should return to the country, away from the poisonous foulness of the town. When replanted back in Sudbury, Gainsborough tried to catch a moment before the sorrow, and set mother, father and child outdoors, as if they had all been in the country, the little girl like a pippin in their laps. But the picture had gone wrong and lost its consolation; become stiff, like her dead form, and had turned into a memento mori. He and his wife sit, awkward in their solemnity, and as physically distant from each other as they had been in the wake of the calamity. ‘My wife is weak but good,’ Gainsborough would later write, a little mean-spiritedly, of Margaret Burr; ‘never much formed to humour my happiness.’ The autumnal, leafless scenery speaks of loss and desolation. The rakish angle of Gainsborough’s tricorn looks like the effect of indifference to outward appearance: a manner undone.
Perhaps his wife had been right, though. For God was kinder to them in the country, and when another daughter arrived they called her (as was often the custom) after the lost one. This Mary the second was a sturdy, pretty girl, and the sister who came soon after her, Margaret, every bit as lively, with her mother’s strong, curving nose planted in the middle of her face.
Now, in Ipswich, Gainsborough wanted to turn their little world into something big; something that would make those who saw the painting smile and sigh. Children were no longer pictured as they once had been: miniatures of their elders, albeit smothered in infant skirts; solemn, unnaturally still; incipient adults. Nor were they any longer seen as wicked imps, in need of stern governing lest their unbroken animal nature lead them astray. Their play was now looked on as the sport of their innocence. Parents had become so enamoured of the romping that they had even asked artists to record it, but those like Hogarth who had made the attempt had somehow made the children animated dolls: gleeful, but oddly jerky in their motions, as if strung by a puppeteer, the room about them a toy theatre. Gainsborough had another idea entirely. He would have his two girls fill a big canvas, catch them in whooping pursuit of the butterfly, at the very moment when it had landed for an instant, upon – why not? – a thistle: the sweetness of the moment pricked by the thorn on the leaf.
The little drama, as it had become in his mind, required at least a touch of poetic licence. As if enticed by a magical butterfly in some fairy tale, the girls run forth out of a darkling wood into a blaze of light. Though their sleeves are rolled up and Gainsborough has them clothed realistically, simple skirts covered by bodices and aprons, the swishing, brightly coloured dresses are loose enough for their father to describe the movement of their bodies, the dancing nimbleness of their feet. But there is a brilliant conceit at the heart of the composition, turning on the business of their hands. One of the loveliest things about his paintings of the girls is that Gainsborough plainly saw their differences: ‘Molly’, the more reserved and careful, a little bit like her mother; Margaret earning her nickname, ‘the Captain’, from her sweet impetuousness. So it is the Captain who lunges towards the cabbage white, while her older sister, more circumspect, stands back a little, throwing the sash of her dress over her left shoulder. Different, then, the girls, but also complementary, inseparable; their hands clasped together at the moment of excitement, turning the two of them into a single human butterfly, one a fluttering wing of gold, the other creamy white.
If only masterpieces had the power to stop time. But they don’t. The instant of perfect innocence would last no longer than the life of the flitting insect.
Surprisingly, when the Gainsboroughs departed Suffolk for Bath and more fashionable opportunities, they left the butterfly painting behind, albeit with a neighbour, the Revd Robert Hingeston, whose parsonage backed on to their garden and who must, many times, have watched the girls at play. Other portraits, made when Molly was around eleven and Peggy nine, preserve, in exquisite and unusually affectionate poses, the strength of their sisterly bond. None of them was finished, as if Gainsborough could not bear to trap their freshness and spontaneity within a coating of embalming varnish. In the painting where Mary has a protective arm slung over the shoulder of her sister, the dashing freedom of Gainsborough’s brushstrokes is still uncompromised by finish. Given that later on in his career Gainsborough would turn into a one-man service industry of sentimental images of children, whether beggar urchins or Blue Boys, these early pictures of his girls are utterly free of winsome ingratiation. They are his own children of nature, and he paints truth revealed on their faces. Mary’s copper hair is sweetly windblown up from her brow. Margaret’s pout and the raised eyebrows plead with the artist for release from the torment of posing. Pleeeease, Father, dear … Isn’t it over yet … pleeease? There was to have been a cat, cradled in Mary’s left arm; the outline sketch visible; a Cheshire grin weirdly apparent and fugitive. Kitties appeared all the time in eighteenth-century pictures of children, especially those of young girls, whether or not they happened to be around; a conventional emblem of playfulness with claws. It would have been like Gainsborough at this stage of his career to disdain the commonplace. Another, still more tender, painting has Mary extending her arm full length to grasp a lock of hair on her sister’s head. Since Mary herself has a little nosegay of flowers in her hair, it’s possible to read the gesture as her clasping Margaret’s hair before likewise dressing it. But there is something unsettling and even unhappy about the look Margaret is giving her father, something more than the tomboy who doesn’t care to have pansies stuck in her hair.
There was something the matter with Mary. In 1771, called in to examine a fit of odd behaviour, Dr Abel Moysey declared it ‘a family complaint’, one so inescapable that he did not suppose ‘she would ever recover her senses again’. This was a prematurely gloomy judgement. In fact, despite the occasional bout of strangeness, Mary had certainly been lively enough to be sent, along with Margaret, to the Blacklands School in Chelsea, facing the Common in what is now Sloane Square. The school specialized in ‘French education’, which included instruction in the arts. While they were in their mid-teens, living in Bath, Gainsborough had decided that the ‘dear Girls’ should be properly trained as artists. There was surely some reaction to Bath society life in this determination: the musical gatherings and the promenades and the rest of the social circus about which Thomas had mixed feelings even as he joined it. ‘I think,’ he wrote, ‘(and indeed always did myself) that I had better do this [the art teaching] than make a trumpery of them and let them be led away by Vanity and subject to disappointment in the wild Goose Chase.’ The ganders were, of course, prospective husbands. Better his daughters should become artists. By the middle of the eighteenth century this was not such an extraordinary thing. Mary Beale had been one such woman portraitist in the previous century. But Gainsborough was also determined that the girls not just be restricted to the kind of crafty arts thought fitting for women: pastels and decorative drawing. In 1764 he wrote to a friend that he was ‘upon a scheme learning them both to paint landscape that is somewhat above the common fan-mount style. I think them capable of it if taken in time and with proper pains bestowed in that they may do something for their bread.’ Another double portrait painted around that time shows the girls, joined once more by an arm slung over a shoulder, at their work, attending both to their father and to their practice. Mary holds portfolio, sketchpad and porte-crayon, while Margaret studies the kind of plaster modello (this one of the Farnese Flora) that was basic to academic drawing studies for men as much as women.
The plan was, at best, only a partial success. A move to London was going to make the project of keeping the girls honest painters all the more difficult. The social blandishments were too many, not least because Gainsborough was not immune from them himself. Of the girls’ gallivanting, he complained that ‘these fine ladies and their tea drinkings, dancings and husband huntings and such will fob me out of the last ten years and I fear miss getting husbands too.’ And yet he now painted beautiful full-length pictures of each of them, designed to advertise their attractions as if they were the most eligible heiresses in town: Mary, nineteen, pretty rather than beautiful; Margaret, eighteen, always plainer but with the fire of the Captain still in her dark eyes. Gainsborough had become the glass of fashion; just as indispensable to society’s self-regard as Joshua Reynolds: the yang to Reynolds’s yin. Reynolds provided Anglo-classicism: a kind of stentorian grandeur for the men; a sculptural dignity for the women. In contrast, Gainsborough, who wished to catch the subtle movements of facial and body language, was softly forgiving and airy; the lightly mixed paint was laid on with dancing grace. In 1799 Margaret told Joseph Farington that her father’s colours were so liquid that, should he not hold the palette perfectly horizontally, they would run over the rim.
The perfect analogy for Gainsborough’s style was music; one he made himself. ‘One part of a picture ought to be like the first part of a tune,’ he wrote to his friend William Jackson ‘[so] that you can guess what follows.’ He was an accomplished performer on no fewer than seven instruments, including viola da gamba and flute, which may have made him too much of a severe critic of Margaret’s ‘jangling’ on the harpsichord, though many others admired the girls’ talent. Music was all around them, not least coming from the Cosways’ concerts next door, which the Gainsboroughs must surely have attended. Gainsborough painted Carl Friedrich Abel with his viola da gamba and Johann Christian Bach holding one of his own scores but looking out of the frame, his mind lost in composing thought.
It may have been this closeness to the world of London music which helped Gainsborough make the best of a family disaster. His wife, Margaret, had died in 1779, and it had been she who had insisted that instruction in the arts need not be at odds with the girls’ search for suitable matches; that it might even further it. But the mother had also kept a careful eye on suitors. This vigilance was evidently now missing, for, at the end of February 1780, Mary eloped with the German oboeist and composer Johann Christian Fischer, marrying him in the church of Queen Anne’s, Soho. Perhaps Fischer had something of a reputation, for Gainsborough, shocked at his daughter’s act of romantic liberty, not least because he suspected the musician had been courting Margaret, wrote to his sister, ‘I have never suffered that worthy Gentleman ever to be in their company since I came to London and behold, while I had my eye on Peggy, the other slyboots I suppose had all along been the object.’ Dismayed and angry though he was, it says something about Gainsborough’s character that he could not in the end bring down the full force of condemnation on the couple. He said that he did not in any case have much choice in the matter, though, like other angry fathers, he could in fact have threatened or carried out disinheritance. But, to his credit, this was not Gainsborough’s way:
The notice I had of it was very sudden, as I had not the least suspicion of the attachment being so long and deeply settled … as it was too late for me to do anything, without being the cause of unhappiness on both sides, my consent, which was a mere compliment to affect to ask, I needs must give, whether such a match was agreeable to me or not, I would not have the cause of unhappiness lay upon my conscience.
Once he recovered from the blow to his widower’s sense of guardianship, Gainsborough hoped for the best. Was not music, after all, the emblem of family harmony? He came round enough to paint a full-length portrait of his new son-in-law. No one could have asked for a more handsome gesture of nuptial reconciliation. Dressed in an elegant rose velvet suit, Fischer is pictured as virtuoso, master of three instruments: the viola da gamba propped on a chair; and the oboe resting on the top of a harpsichord, evidently painted with the attentiveness of someone who knew all about music. Fischer himself is seen in mid-composition, gaze distant, quill in hand, the score spread out; a stack of music lying beneath the harpsichord. If there seems to be a look of self-admiration on Fischer’s face, it may be Gainsborough’s way of registering the musician’s ‘oddities and temper’, which the painter referred to in another letter to his sister, making sure to add that he had no ‘reason to doubt the man’s honesty or goodness of heart, as I have never heard anyone speak anything amiss of him’. As for those high-strung moods of her husband, ‘[Mary] must learn to like them as she likes his person for nothing can be altered now. I pray God she may be happy with him and have her health.’
Gainsborough’s nagging anxieties were well founded; the marriage was a calamity. Hardly had the couple settled into a home on the Brompton Road than the artist realized he had in fact been deceived by Fischer as to the means by which he claimed to be able to support himself and his wife. And though there was nothing fraudulent about it, Gainsborough was horrified to find Mary buying up bed linens in order to resell them quickly at a profit. There was an ugly scene. Distraught and angry, Mary ‘convinced me [she] would go to the gallows to serve this man’. Desperate, and without his wife for support, Gainsborough asked his sister to intervene: ‘Send for her and give her such a lecture as may save her from destruction. Do it in the most solemn manner for I am alarmed at the appearance of dishonesty and quite unhappy.’
That was the least of it. Fischer’s eccentricity collided with Mary’s mental instability and after six months they separated for good. Presumably, Mary went back to live with her father but, after he died eight years later, the sisters lived together for the remainder of their long lives, in the suburban garden villages west of London: Brentford, Brook Green and then, for a long time, in Acton. Though Mary became quite deranged, Margaret never had any thought of packing her sister off to one of the terrifying Bedlams and devoted much of the rest of her life to tending to her.
When death came to Gainsborough in 1788, it took him by surprise. Habitually worried about his health as well as his wealth, he had always put his faith in physicians, but the one whom he consulted about sudden pains told him there was nothing to worry about. In fact, a tumour was galloping through his body.
His last decade had been crowned with extraordinary success: fully the equal of Reynolds’s. No one important in Britain could do without one of his portraits: from Queen Charlotte and the Prince of Wales to the latter’s many inamorata – Perdita Robinson and, of course, Maria Fitzherbert, as well as Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, whom he had first painted as a sparky little girl. That was when his pictures of children still had a wonderfully observed freshness and truth. Realizing now he could capitalize on a sentimentalized fashion for depicting waifs and strays, the older Gainsborough created a special genre of cosmetically adjusted beggar children, rustic boys and girls outside cottage doors, or else the progeny of the better-off dressed up à la Van Dyck in velvet breeches: the sugary confections of his Blue Boy period. He was looking at children differently now: as money-models striking poses which would appeal to his chin-chucking parental clientele even as they climbed into carriages for an assignation with their latest lover. He had begun with human truth and had ended in lucrative falsehood. To the end, Thomas Gainsborough had the eye of the loving father, but, no more than any other artist, or parent, was he able to cope with his children growing into adults. Perhaps this was because a good piece of himself, possibly the best, in fact, had never altogether grown up. In his very last letter, at death’s door, he confessed the blessed truth: ‘I am so childish that I could make a Kite, catch Gold Finches or build little Ships.’
