Word: gainsboroughs
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...London, a delightful retrospective of Gainsborough...
...Thomas Gainsborough was the most popular portraitist in 18th century England, and the English still love him: in every way, the big Gainsborough retrospective now on view at London's Tate Gallery is a ceremony of national taste. Organized by Art Historian John Hayes, it traces Gainsborough's career from his beginnings as apprentice painter of homespun Suffolk dignitaries to his apotheosis as the most popular and sought-after portraitist of the Georgian ruling classes. There are more than 150 paintings and drawings, although some of his best-known work-like the Blue Boy, or the exquisite portrait...
...would be hard for any but the most committed Gainsborough enthusiast (and they exist) to rank him equal to those two pillars of English vision, John Constable and J.M.W. Turner. He did not have Constable's deep, poetic curiosity about the facts of landscape; still less did he rise to Turner's heights of sublimity or audacity of color. But both painters admired him. "Soothing, tender and affecting," Constable called Gainsborough's landscapes. "His object was to deliver a fine sentiment, and he has fully accomplished it ... The stillness of noon, the depths of twilight...
...temperament Gainsborough I was an ideal society portraitist. "His conversation was sprightly, but licentious," one of his friends remembered. "The common topics, or any of a superior cast, he thoroughly hated, and always interrupted by some stroke of wit or humour ... so far from writing, [he] scarcely ever read a book-but, for a letter to an intimate friend, he had few equals." He loved music, and entertained his friends by playing the harpsichord and the viola da gamba. "Liberal, thoughtless, and dissipated," he called himself, and admired (without particularly envying it) the application of sturdier and more evenminded talents...
...many as possible, and indeed have turned the potential problem of overcrowding to advantage. The paintings are displayed so that they inform each other; like well-placed guests around a dinner table, they engage naturally in conversation. The juxtaposition of the 1783 Portrait of Benjamin Thompson, by Gainsborough, with Copley's 1788 portrait of two colonels, hung directly below, reveals the English master's direct influence on American painting. The contrast between the gentlemanly rendering of the English officer and the frank force of the American portrait highlights the differing achievements of the two artists. Seymour Slive and Sydney Freedberg...