In this respect, Delacroix’s closest artistic ancestor was clearly the great eighteenth-century English painter Thomas Gainsborough, a man of whom his long-standing friend, the English composer and polemicist William Jackson said, “There were times when music seemed to be Gainsborough’s employment and painting his diversion”. Not only did the painter number many musicians among his friends, but he is also said to have preferred their company to that of his fellow artists. He was a viola da gamba player, although by Jackson’s account not a particularly distinguished one, he attempted to learn the lute, the violin, and the flute, and, despite not caring for the instrument, is known to have purchased a harpsichord from Burkat Shudi the elder, the eminent builder who also numbered among the artist’s friends. Most importantly of all from the point of view of posterity, some of his most memorable portraits immortalized the features of such distinguished London-based musicians of the day as his intimate friends and fellow carousers Carl Friedrich Abel, Johann Christian Bach, Felice Giardini, and the oboist and composer Johann Christian Fischer (who became Gainsborough’s son-in-law), not to mention the beautiful Linley sisters, Elizabeth Ann and Mary, ill-fated members of an ill-starred family.
Life and Character
Thomas Gainsborough was born in Sudbury, Suffolk in May 1727. His birth date is not known, but is likely to have been a few days before his baptism on 14 May. Early signs of talent as a landscape painter led his father, a shroud-maker, to send the boy to London at some time around his thirteenth birthday. There he became a pupil of the French engraver Hubert Gravelot, in whose studio he not only came under the influence of Gravelot’s French rococo style, but also that of the English painter Francis Hayman. Sometime around 1743 or 1744 Gainsborough established his own studio in Hatton Gardens, Clerkenwell, but five years later he returned to Sudbury, having in the meantime married Margaret Burr, a natural daughter of the Duke of Beaufort.
In 1752 the family, which now included two daughters, Mary and Margaret, moved again, on this occasion only as far as Ipswich, the largest town in Suffolk. By this time Gainsborough had already established some reputation as both a portrait and landscape painter, his work during this period including Mr and Mrs Andrews (c.1748-1750), one of the quintessential English paintings of the eighteenth century. It was doubtless such progress in his career that encouraged Gainsborough to move to the potentially more lucrative surroundings of the fashionable spa town of Bath, where he settled in 1759. In Bath, the painter not only rapidly built up a wealthy clientele of sitters, but also started to move in musical and theatrical circles, becoming friendly with the great actor David Garrick and the gifted Linley family. Three years after the move to Bath, Gainsborough’s career was disrupted by serious illness, but in 1768 he was invited to become a founder member of the newly established Royal Academy, of which his great rival Joshua Reynolds had been elected President.
Gainsborough’s move to London in 1774 has been the subject of some debate among scholars, it seemingly having no rational motivation. But it appears possible that he was starting to experience a decline in business among the fickle leaders of fashion who thronged Bath during “the season”. Whatever the reason, Gainsborough was now a wealthy man – his annual income by this time has been estimated to have been in excess of 20,000 guineas, a huge sum – and he was able to establish a new home in fashionable Pall Mall, at the same time developing further his circle of musical and other friends. The 1780s witnessed both continued acclaim and disappointment, with the artist’s virtual adoption as unofficial painter to the royal family marred by his disappointment at not being granted the official position of Principal Painter, a post that went to Reynolds on the death in 1784 of the incumbent, Allan Ramsey. In the same year he had the second of two quarrels with the Royal Academy over the hanging of his pictures, as a consequence starting a series of annual exhibitions of his own. In the spring of 1788, Gainsborough first mentions what turned out to be a cancerous growth on his neck. He died on 2 August, but not before a touching reconciliation with his old rival Reynolds, who was one of the pallbearers at his funeral at Kew on the outskirts of London.
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