Word: gainsborough
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...flavors set to hit Harvard Square later this month when the Cornpopper store opens on Mt. Auburn St. And while the merchandise may be novel, the Cambridge locate is in no way an experiment Cornpopper stores have already proved successful in Texas, Florida, Georgia, and Tennessee, according to Steven Gainsborough, the chain's associate owner...
Many of his best pictures were hung in England. Gainsborough copied his gnarled-oak thickets; Turner's early marine paintings were done under the partial spell of Ruisdael's sea pieces, his slim parallelograms of rusty sail leaning on the wind-chopped estuary. Most of all, John Constable was inspired by his sense of nature seen fresh, without evident convention: the patches of scudding sunlight on wheat fields, the broken arc of a rainbow, the painterly delight in filling three-quarters of a canvas with high piling clouds. Time and again, one sees images in Constable that might...
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...
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...
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...