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Stubbs cleverly incorporates the horses into the landscape by using a subtle counter-change of tones to integrate them with the background: he contrasts the light profile of the white horse against a dark cloud in order to counterbalance the dark profiles of chestnut mares against the light sky. This tonal exchange is mirrored in the layout of the landscape where the bright billowing clouds are echoed by the dark forms of the tree. Even the foals seem to draw milk from their mothers in much the same way that the land draws sustenance from the river. This is an idyllic vision of a Utopian world uncorrupted by the presence of man.

George Stubbs was known to paint his horses first and their backgrounds later. It was the horses that demanded Stubbs' attention and any background, although brilliantly executed with superb skill, was of secondary importance. Therefore, it should not be surprising that many consider Mares and Foals without a background from 1762 to be the best painting in the series.

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This may be an unfinished work or it could have been a study for the development of other paintings you can see a similar configuration of horses in Mares and Foals in a River Landscape. Either way it is still a masterpiece. The composition is arranged in a frieze-like design which unfolds with classical composure. The lack of a background only serves to focus our attention on the magnificent physique of each of these graceful creatures as they quietly commune with one another. The rhythmic movement of their backs and legs is a melodic reflection of their gentle temperament and latent energy. It is the balance between the intense realism of Stubbs painting and the abstract movements of line, shape and tone across the composition that makes this image so appealing to modern eyes.

Stubbs' most famous painting of a horse is Whistlejacket. This champion racehorse was owned by the 2nd Marquess of Rockingham who commissioned Stubbs to paint many of the horses in his stables. The scale (around 10 feet high) and pose is typical of an equestrian portrait without the rider. It was suggested at the time that the rider should have been George III but there is no evidence to confirm this. The quality of this painting lifts it out of the equestrian genre and elevates it to the status of portraiture. This wonderful horse has a more dynamic personality and glows with more vitality than most portraits you could think of.

(Abridged from: George Stubbs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Stubbs)

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1. Fill in the gaps with one word.

was, "to convince ... that nature was and is always superior to art ... Greek or Roman, and ... renewed this conviction he immediately resolved ... returning home".

4. ... 1759 the 3rd Duke of Richmond commissioned three large pictures ...

him, and his career ... soon secure.

5.This and two ... paintings carried ... for Rockingham break ... convention

... having plain backgrounds.

6.He ... painted horses ... their grooms, ... he always painted ... individuals.

7.He ... preoccupied .. the theme ... a wild horse threatened... a lion and produced ... variations... this theme.

8.Stubbs ... painted historical pictures, but ... are much ... well regarded.

9.Also in the 1770s he painted ... portraits of dogs ... the first time, ... also receiving an increasing number of commissions to paint hunts with their ... of hounds.

10.... curves of the horses' backs naturally lead the eye on one to ... and make a graceful linear .... .

2. Study the pictures by G. Stubbs and analyze the peculiarities of the painter's style, technique and colour scheme.

Text 3.

Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788)

Life and career

Gainsborough was born in 1727 in Sudbury, Suffolk, England. His father was a schoolteacher involved with the wool trade. At the age of fourteen he impressed his father with his pencilling skills so that he let him go to London to study art in 1740. In London he first trained under engraver Hubert Gavelot but eventually became associated with William Hogarth and his school. One of his mentors was Francis Hayman. In those years he contributed to the decoration of what is now the Thomas Coram Foundation for Children and the supper boxes at Vauxhall Gardens.

In the 1740s Gainsborough married Margaret Burr whose illegitimate father, Duke of Beaufort gave them £200 annuity. His work, which was mainly composed of landscape paintings, was not selling very well. He returned to Sudbury in 1748-1749 and concentrated on painting portraits.

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In 1752 he and family, now including two daughters, moved to Ipswich. Commissions for personal portraits increased but his clientele included mainly local merchants and squires. He had to borrow against his wife's annuity.

In 1759 Gainsborough and his family moved to Bath. There he studied portraits of Van Dyck and was eventually able to attract better-paying high society clientele. In 1761 he began to send work to the Society of Arts exhibition in London and from 1769 to the Royal Academy's annual exhibitions. He selected portraits of known or notorious clients to attract attention. Exhibitions helped him to gain national reputation and he was invited to become one of the founding members of Royal Academy in 1769. His relationship with the academy, however, was not an easy one and he stopped exhibiting his paintings there in 1773.

In 1774 Gainsborough and his family moved to London to live in Schomberg House, Pall Mall. In 1777 he again began to exhibit his paintings in the Royal Academy, with portraits of contemporary celebrities, including the Duke and Duchess of Cumberland, related to the royal family. These exhibitions continued for the next six years.

In 1780 he painted the portraits of the king George III and his queen and afterwards received many royal commissions. This gave him some leverage with the Academy to state in what form he wished his work to be exhibited. However, in 1783 he took his paintings from the forthcoming exhibition and moved them to Schomberg House. In 1784 royal painter Allan Ramsay died and the king was obliged to give the job to Gainsborough's rival and Academy's president, Joshua Reynolds. Gainsborough still remained the personal favorite painter of the royal family.

In his later years he often painted landscape paintings of common settings. With Richard Wilson, he was one of the originators of the eighteenth-century British landscape school, and with Joshua Reynolds, he was the dominant British portraitist of the second half of the 18th century.

Gainsborough painted more from his observations of nature than from any application of formal rules. The poetic sensibility of his paintings caused Constable to say, "On looking at them, we find tears in our eyes and know not what brings them." He himself said, "I'm sick of Portraits, and wish very much to take my viol-da-gam (Italian: viola da gamba) and walk off to some sweet village, where I can paint landskips and enjoy the fag end of life in quietness and ease."

Style and colour scheme. Works (portraiture).

Apart from his earliest work, of which little trace exists, Gainsborough's painting can be divided conveniently into three periods according to where he lived. In 1745 he returned from London to Suffolk and remained in his native county until 1759, when his friend and patron Thicknesse persuaded him to take the adventurous step of moving to Bath a step which proved the turning point in his career. From 1759 till 1774 he lived in Bath where his reputation steadily

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increased. In 1774 he moved to London, where he remained until his death in 1788. The second step was much less of an adventure; for he had already exhibited in the first exhibition of the Academy in 1769 and from then continuously until 1772, so that his work was well known in London. The change in Gainsborough's style from the Ipswich to the Bath period was marked; while the change from the Bath style to the final London style was less fundamental and came by much slower degrees.

In 1745 Gainsborough returned to Suffolk and set to work industriously both at landscapes and at portraiture. At under twenty he married Margaret Burr, who is supposed to have been a natural daughter of one of the Dukes of Bedford; that she was endowed with character as well as charm, appears in her husband's likeness of her in the small group of Gainsborough, his wife and child and in the much later portrait by his hand, where she appears saddened by experience.

Gainsborough's Self Portraits bear out what is known of his character, revealing his handsome person and something of his sensitive nature, which becomes clearer in the beautiful unfinished head, roughly contemporary in date. Gainsborough, who was often irritable, capricious and lacking in persistence, had also the lovable qualities of an affectionate nature of innate refinement, sensitive in a high degree to all forms of beauty, whether in man, in nature or in the arts pictorial and musical. While Reynolds' friendships were mainly with literary men, Gainsborough's were with actors and musicians, his most distinguished friend being the playwright Sheridan. He was an enthusiastic amateur violinist.

The impulsive unreasonable Gainsborough and the courteous and intellectual Reynolds could hardly have been warm friends. In 1788, however, shortly before he died, Gainsborough wrote Reynolds a letter begging him 'to come under my roof and see my things.' He adds 'My woodman you never saw' and ends 'I can with a sincere Heart say that I always admired and sincerely loved Sir Joshua Reynolds.' That Sir Joshua was touched and came to see him is evident from his Fourteenth Discourse, which he devoted largely to an estimate of Gainsborough's work.

There is little trace of Gainsborough's work of his first apprentice period in London, unless the signature and dates 1743-1744 upon two drawings of a man and woman in the National Portrait Gallery in Ireland are genuine. If so they are remarkable works for so young a man, the expressions already being lively and the outlines sensitive.

One of the first of Gainsborough's portraits in oils of the Suffolk period (1745-59) must be that of Henneage Lloyd and his sister. The composition is of the naive kind found in many of his early groups, more than half of the horizontal length of the picture being devoted to a conventional landscape. The figures are almost as stiffly posed; but there is a shy fresh charm about the countenances of the gentle youth and maiden, which shows Gainsborough to be

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already Hogarth's equal for spontaneity and his superior for refinement in the recording of facial expression.

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Another small full length group of Joshua Kirby and his wife shows again, in the more fluent painting of the lady's dress, what Gainsborough had been learning from Hogarth on the technical side an advance which makes as lightly later date probable. From the still more marked increase in technical accomplishment shown in the beautiful group of Robert Andrews and his wife it may be guessed that it is several years later in date than the Lloyd and Kirby pictures. Andrews stands and his lady sits before a field of gathered corn; their countenances are full of animation and charm. In spite of its unstudied lack of symmetry the picture gains unity from the convincing rendering of gleams of sunlight. The naivete and refinement of the conception and the combined ease and precision of the execution make it one of the loveliest of all Gainsborough's works.

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Robert Andrews and His Wife Frances http://proxy11.media.online.ua/key/r3-best-myizy/d8eb454e2aca311af781166a764d9f81.jpeg

Mention has already been made of the portrait of Gainsborough, his wife and child. Here the loose rapid treatment of the trees (which anticipates Gainsborough's later technique), as well as the more sophisticated composition would have suggested as late a date as 1759, but for the age of the child which shows that it cannot be much later than 1756. It is noticeable that Gainsborough has taken much longer over his wife's head than over his own; while both are executed with wonderfully delicate precision. Allowing for the difference of fashion seen in the freer treatment of accessories, the way that Gainsborough's delicacy of execution expresses a tenderness of sentiment has surely something in common with the work of the Hilliard tradition. He shows something also of the same childlike enjoyment of colour in painting his wife's blue dress and his own scarlet waistcoat, though this is tempered by a more exact knowledge of the relation of colour to light.

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Such works on a small scale are among Gainsborough's finest achievements of the Ipswich period. Meanwhile he was also painting full-sized portraits such as the life-sized heads of the older Kirbys, John Kirby and his wife which are remarkable among his early works for their rich colour and for their completeness of characterisation. Gainsborough took more pains over his drawing at this than at later stages in his career. His Admiral Vernon, which is of the Ipswich period, is better proportioned and more solid about the shoulders and arms than are most of the persons in his Bath or London portraits.

Sir Charles Holmes attributes to a study by Gainsborough of the works of Kneller the increased power that he shows during the Ipswich period of modelling solidly with directly applied paint. This advance can be seen by comparing his two portraits of his little daughters Mary and Margaret Gainsborough. In the first, which he nicknamed 'Molly and the Captain,' Margaret is chasing a butterfly and Mary is holding her hand. The background has darkened, the forms of the limbs are little explained, but there is beauty in the colour and texture of the dresses and more in the tender modelling of the heads.

The second portrait which is unfinished, is evidently later in date judging by the children's ages and may even belong to 1760-61 (that is to the beginning of the Bath period). Gainsborough never completed the cat which he has sketched in on Margaret's lap. He shows the same fatherly understanding of his children's character; Mary as before being sweetly protective of her sadder younger sister; but this time his sympathy has carried Gainsborough further so that he has shown, what is rare with him, an almost sculpturesque knowledge of the form of Margaret's foreshortened head, following the modelling with the strokes of his brush as though with a caress; for his brush strokes are clearly visible although the paint is somewhat thicker than in his average work of a later date. The hanging of the portrait near to that of Hogarth's Sister, shows what traditions Gainsborough and Hogarth have in common both technically and as colourists; the yellow has been given a similar richness by being painted over a reddish-brown ground; but the comparison also shows that Gainsborough is capable at his best of greater completeness as a draughtsman.

Gainsborough first came to know the portraits of Van Dyck, whom he thence forward regarded as his ideal in portraiture, after he had settled in Bath in 1760. The new influence is scarcely apparent in his half length of Edward Orpin, Parish Clerk of Bradford on Avon of about 1760, except perhaps in the more methodical composition. The colour scheme of this picture is quiet, its chief attractions being its luminosity and the characterisation of the simple minded old man, whom Gainsborough was well able to understand.

One of Gainsborough's best portraits of the Bath period is that of the Little Miss Juliet Mott of 1766 which combines luminosity and beauty of colour with a sound firmness of modelling and with a thorough grasp of the capacity for mischief that underlies the outside primness of the child's manner.

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Probably the drawing of the accessories, especially of the hands, was never so sound in the later portrait of 1768 of Eliza and Thomas Linley, though it is difficult to be certain since this part of the picture has clearly been overcleaned. Gainsborough has now fully developed that lightness and dexterity in the handling of the brush which he derived from his studies of Van Dyck and of Rubens, a dexterity in which he has never been excelled by any other English painter. It can be seen as much in the decisive drawing of the beautiful eyes with their large black pupils within the blue irises, as in the freer treatment of the hair and of Eliza's dress. The faces are no doubt idealised; but the inspiration, as always with Gainsborough, has come from a moment of contact with living individuals. Much of the charm of the picture depends upon the spontaneity with which the boy has thrust himself forward, so that it seems a record of a momentary event. Owing to the influence of Van Dyck, Gainsborough has completely changed his scheme of colour; the light yellows and blues that belong to his Ipswich period have given place to a richer scheme in which a deeper blue is opposed to reds and browns. The most positive red occurs in the boy's waistcoat, but is echoed again in a modified form in his hair and in the reflected light upon his sister's hands. The full tones in the modelling of the faces have also a reddish tint. Gainsborough also shows a tendency to break one colour into the other, which is seen especially in Eliza's dress and in the treatment of the sky.

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Such masterpieces must be regarded as creative works rather than as portraits in the strict sense. There would always be some uncertainty as to how Gainsborough's temperament would react to that of his sitter. His men's portraits are often less beautiful than his portraits of women. One publicly exhibited example, however, his John Henderson of 1772, though the actor's artificial smile may be displeasing, is an admirable example of how solidly Gainsborough could model during the Bath period and of his use at this time of a warm brown background, which here harmonises richly with the green and red of the dress. The full length of Dr. Schomberg, which is of about the same date, is less

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pleasing in colour, but more attractive in characterisation. The doctor seems to be vigorous, alert, perhaps a little insensitive, not without humour; but if this portrait be compared with Reynolds' Lord Heathfield, which is hung near to it, Gainsborough's work will be found less complete as a revelation of character.

Gainsborough is not capable of leaving himself out of the picture as Reynolds has in the Lord Heathjield, for it is both Gainsborough's strength and his weakness that his own personality is never absent from his portraits. He tells more about what Dr. Schomberg thought of Gainsborough, than about what manner of man Dr. Schomberg was himself.

Gainsborough's move in 1774 from Bath to London did not produce such an immediate change in the style of his work, as that which had occurred when he had left Ipswich for Bath. For this reason it does not appear to have been proved beyond dispute, whether certain undated portraits by him were painted in Bath or in London. One of these is the famous Blue Boy, which is actually the likeness of Jonathan Buttall, the son of a wealthy ironmonger, whom Gainsborough, partly by dressing him in the clothes of the Van Dyck period and more by the beauty of feature and of bearing which he has given to him, has converted into a kind of fairy prince. How much of this charm existed in fact and how much was imagined by the painter will never be known; for all such idealised portraits are a blend of both what the artist and what the sitter has supplied.

From Sir Walter Armstrong's description of the Blue Boy it can only be inferred that it belongs either to the beginning of the London or to the end of the Bath period. 'The loaded impasto, 'he says, 'the tendency to brown and beyond it, the preoccupation with force, all seem to belong to the same period as the group at Knole and to be inconsistent with the feathery lightness, which marks Gainsborough's work at the end of his life.'

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