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The image of Gainsborough that emerges from his surviving letters and the anecdotes related by his friends is of an unusually attractive figure, if one at times prone to the excesses of conviviality fashionable in Georgian England. There are contradictions, too. Generous to a fault, he was also a man whose strong religious convictions (he refused to work on Sundays) did not preclude him from indulging in adulterous relationships. The letters, which reveal much about the man, are fluently written, punctuated by dashes as the writer moves easily from one topic to another. They are also extremely entertaining. Regrettably, after his death a rather more censorious age found many of them licentious, as a result of which a number were apparently destroyed. Some small flavour of Gainsborough’s writing, and his relationship with some of his musician friends, can be gauged from an apologetic letter he wrote to an aristocratic friend in London in May 1772, explaining why he had been unable to call:
I was hugging myself as I pass’d through Harley street, that as I had not met one Fidler or Hautboy [oboe] Man, I should doubtless have leisure to wait upon you again, but behold, not three doors from yours, I ran my head plump into Abel’s fat Guts. He promised I should hear a man blow half-notes upon the French [horn] if I would dine with Him; I found Fisher [recte Fischer], Bach & Duport [the French cellist Jean Pierre Duport], all ready to make a finish of me for the day I had to stay in Town, so that not a Friend, a Picture, or anything I liked could I enjoy – except only a little Venus rising from the sea in my way to my Lodgings…
The unflattering reference to Abel reminds us that the composer was portly, although Gainsborough’s superb portrait of him goes some way to disguising the fact (Fig. 4). The “little Venus” was a prostitute, the allusion being to the title of a painting currently being exhibited at that year’s Royal Academy exhibition. The protests are undoubtedly somewhat ingenuous, since Gainsborough was known to have a particular leaning toward the company of musicians. His daughter Margaret recorded that her father was “much led into the company of musicians, with whom he often exceeded the bounds of intemperance… being occasionally unable to work for a week afterwards.”
As with his personal letters, the receipt of one of which was considered by one of his friends to contain so much of Gainsborough that there was “never the heart to burn it”, so with Gainsborough’s lively conversation, which made his company much sought after. “His favourite subjects”, noted one of his circle, “were music and painting; which he treated in a manner peculiarly his own. The common topics, or any of a superior cast, he thoroughly hated, and always interrupted by some stroke of wit and humour.”
The painter’s relationship with his clients was unusual in an era when they often expected the servility of those in the arts world. Like his great contemporary Sir Joshua Reynolds, Gainsborough did not consider himself subservient in his dealings with the aristocracy who sought his services. Rather, his manner with them with easy and informal, an attitude he adopted even with the royal family. He once claimed that he ‘had talked bawdy with the king, and morality with the Prince of Wales’, a neat piece of wit understood only by recalling that while George III was a man of impeccable morals, those of his eldest son were anything but impeccable.
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