616. Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788),

English, Mrs. Siddons, 1785.

Oil on canvas, 126 x 99.5 cm.

The National Gallery, London. Romanticism.

 

 

Thomas Gainsborough

(1727 Sudbury – 1788 London)

 

Thomas Gainsborough, four years younger than Reynolds rivalled him in fame. He had nothing of the theorist, the teacher, the leader of a school, and he never thought of combining in his art skilful borrowings from the greatest artists of various foreign schools. Unlike Reynolds he never left England and, after several years of apprenticeship in London, spent the greater part of his life successively at Sudbury, Ipswich and Bath. Gainsborough is not an impeccable draughtsman, his compositions are not skilfully balanced like those of Reynolds, and his figures often seem disposed haphazardly on the canvas. But he has charm. He is a poet, and a poet by instinct, quivering with sensitivity, capricious and fantastic but always natural. Although he painted some good portraits of men he is, par excellence, the painter of women and children. A profound admirer of van Dyck – he took him for a model – this admiration does not detract from his originality, which has a unique quality of seductiveness. On van Dyck’s themes, such as that of the boy clad in costly satin, a woman’s face, long and delicate in its aristocratic grace, he composed entirely new variations.