Word: gainsborough
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John Singer Sargent, standing at the easel in his studio on London's Tite Street, used to mutter, "Gainsborough would have done it!" But in his heart he knew he was no Gainsborough. What Sargent had in abundance was a capacity for flattering his sitters in paint, and naturally they flocked to him. He complained that "portrait painting is a pimp's profession," and late in life he swore off it. "No more paughtraits," he wrote triumphantly to a friend. "I abhor and abjure them and hope never to do another, especially of the Upper Classes...
...what to do? Well, you select an appetizing package with a good profile all the way and a face like an old Gainsborough . . . You might develop a few slogans to put across your more exciting products...
...Loch More, Scotland. Reportedly worth $168 million in inherited real estate (e.g.. 200,000 acres of farmland, 600 acres of London's West End. including the site of the U.S. embassy), the fun-loving duke was a World War I hero, a collector of great art (e.g., Gainsborough's The Blue Boy), and a ladies' man (four marriages, three divorces). To celebrate his third marriage (to Socialite Loelia Ponsonby) in 1930, he granted his poorer tenants remission of arrears and a week's free rent, but hoped in vain for a son to succeed...
Painting in Britain, 1530-1790, by the University of Birmingham's E. K. Waterhouse, begins with the age of Holbein and Henry VIII, moves on through Van Dyck and Hogarth to Sir Joshua Reynolds, Gainsborough and the 18th century classicists. Backing up the text are 192 pages of black & white reproductions...
...Sermon on the Mount created a hilltop grove, shepherds and their flock, a wide and crowded harbor and a distant town, all with a little ink and broad watery washes. Peter Paul Rubens' delicately tinted watercolor of a farmyard was as tender and vivid as April grass. Thomas Gainsborough's charcoal sketches showed that he could read the face of a field as surely as a human expression...