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All these qualities are to be found in the portrait of the Duchess of Cumberland of 1777, a fact which shows how closely his early work of the London period resembled his work in Bath. The Duchess of Cumberland, though not psychologically one of the most interesting of Gainsborough's portraits, is one of the most beautiful for the quality of its paint, for its colour and for its design. The dull crimson and blue robes against the dark archway make a harmony of almost Venetian splendour. Moreover, the firm modelling, the rich thickly impasted paint in the lights and the well considered balance of light and shade, give it merits more commonly associated with Reynolds' work, in addition to the delicacy and grace of handling which is Gainsborough's own. The later portrait of Queen Charlotte, for all its aerial depth and charm of characterisation looks flimsy in comparison.

Gainsborough's genius in portraiture is seen best when he is painting women. He makes no attempt at a complete or complicated revelation; at the same time he does much more than create one particular ideal type. On each occasion that he came into contact with a beautiful lady, it is clear that she became to him a fresh personal inspiration. So his Miss Singleton (of 1769 ?) his

Mrs. Sheridan and Mrs. Tickell of about 1782 and his Mrs. Robinson of 1784 have each their own charm. Each of them has for an instant inspired Gainsborough in the moment of her fleeting acquaintance with him, with a new poem in line and light and colour something fragmentary and lyrical which always has the note of a separate experience.

Thus Miss Singleton has a lively coquettish attraction; Mrs. Sheridan is more imaginative and musical; Mrs. Robinson is just passively and unintellectually beautiful; all are perfectly distinct.

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The Linley sisters (Mrs. Sheridan and Mrs. Tickell)

The feminine charm that Gainsborough expresses is always of a spiritual and ethereal kind: a tendency which increases in the course of his work of the London period. Thus in the group of Mrs. Sheridan and Mrs. Tickell there is

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some doubt as to whether the ladies have bodies, though there is none with regard to the beauty of their souls. Maria (Mrs. Tickell), is not so much seated upon a bank as mysteriously floating above it and Eliza (now Mrs. Sheridan, formerly the Eliza Linley) leans with her arms upon her guitar but receives little support from the ground. The light strokes of the brush, which describe their dresses, follow a linear rhythm, which can only be compared with the rhythm of music; while it is tempting to compare the blending of colour with a melody. For to state that Maria wears yellow and Eliza light blue gives but little idea of the subtleties of luminous, varying and broken colour. The tendency to melt one tint into another steadily increased in Gainsborough's work as it advanced.

The change that took place in Gainsborough's style during the London period (after 1774) can be seen by comparing three portraits: The Duchess of Cumberland of 1777, the Sheridan and Tickell portrait of 1782 (just described), and Mrs. Robinson as Perdita of 1784. The first two are alike in the warmth of their colour and in the brownness of their shadows, though the lighter, thinner, less substantial style of the Sheridan group is to be contrasted with the more solid modelling and solid impasto of the earlier Cumberland portrait. The last of the three, Mrs. Robinson, is painted even more thinly than the Sheridan group and there has been a marked change from warm to cooler more silvery colour.

Although Mrs. Robinson has the same uncertain anatomy as Mrs. Tickell and although the unity of the composition has been endangered by the attention that has been given to her intelligent dog, the lady's charm still dominates the picture.

One picture of the London period, The Mall seems to sum up the sentiment of all Gainsborough's portraits of ladies. A number of ladies are strolling through St. James's Park in groups of twos and threes, some followed at a distance by admirers, some half hidden by the shadows of the trees, some caught in the bright gleams of sunlight. The design contains obvious reminiscences of Watteau but the sentiment entirely belongs to Gainsborough, who was always catching new glimpses of fleeting fairness.

This account of Gainsborough's portraits may fitly close with some quotations from Reynolds' Fourteenth Discourse: 'Now Gainsborough's portraits were often little more, in regard to. .. determining the form of the features, than what generally attends a dead colour; but as he was always attentive to the general effect, this unfinished manner contributed even to that striking resemblance for which his portraits are so remarkable.. .

There is enough to remind the spectator of the original; the imagination supplies the rest, and perhaps more satisfactorily to himself if not more exactly, than the artist with all his care, could possibly have done.' This is surely a most just estimate of Gainsborough's gifts. Reynolds in speaking of 'the artist himself with all his care'.

(Abridged from: Biography Base http://www.biographybase.com/biography/Gainsborough_Thomas.html;

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Ch. Johnson "English Painting from the Seventh Century to the Present Day" http://www.forgottenbooks.com/readbook/English_Painting_from_the_Seventh_Century_to_t he_Present_Day)

1.Explain the meanings of the words or give synonyms to the highlighted words and phrases.

2.Use the word in capital to form a word that fits in the space.

3. Choose the best answer

1.Gainsborough's father was a/n

a)wool trader

b)aristocrat

c)goldsmith

2.Gainsborough had

a)two sons

b)two daughters

c)a son and a daughter

3.The painter who made the biggest impact on Gainsborough was:

a)Hilliard

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b)Reynolds

c)Van Dyck

4. Gainsborough gained national reputation was invited to become one of the founding members of Royal Academy

a)before his marriage in 1740

b)after the Bath period

c)when he moved back to London from Bath in 1774

5. He became to receive many royal commissions after he had painted the portraits of

a)the Duke and Duchess of Cumberland

b)the king George III

c)the Duke of Beaufort

6.Gainsborough was mainly a

a)portrait painter

b)a landscape painter

c)a painter of both genres

7.The turning point for Gainsborough's career was

1)a move to Bath

2)a move to London

3)a move to Suffolk

8.Gainsborough was often

a)irritable, capricious and impulsive

b)quiet and phlegmatic

c)courteous and intellectual

9.The best friends of the painter were

a)literary men

b)politicians

c)actors and musicians

10. Gainsborough was almost equal for spontaneity in the recording of facial expression with

a)Reynolds

b)Hogarth

c)Hilliard

11.Gainsborough's work Andrews and his wife gains unity from

a)the convincing rendering of gleams of sunlight

b)lack of symmetry

c)the poses of the sitters

12.The Hilliard tradition can be observed in Gainsborough's portrait

a)Gainsborough, his wife and child

b)Joshua Kirby and his wife

c)Robert Andrews and his wife

13.A typical colour scheme for Gainsborough's work is

a)dull and obscure

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b)luminous and refined

c)gaudy and garish

14. The lightness and dexterity in the handling of the brush was a technique that Gainsborough learnt from

a)Hogarth

b)Reynolds

c)Van Dyck and Rubens

15.The painter was better at drawing

a)men

b)women

c)children

16.Both Gainsborough's strength and his weakness was that

a)his own personality is never absent from his portraits

b)he was capable of leaving himself out of the picture as Reynolds

c)he was less complete in the revelation of character

4.Give a brief review of Gainsborough's life and creative activity. Focus on the changes in the artist's technique and style of painting comparing the following works: “Henneage Lloyd and his sister” and “The Blue Boy”.

5.Comment on Constable's and Reynolds' words of the painter.

Text 4.

Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792)

Biography and career development

Sir Joshua Reynolds must undoubtedly be regarded as the greatest of English portrait-painters. He had his faults; he could be merely conventional; his technical experiments have led to the fading, cracking and discoloration of many of his works; his desire for perfection often caused his portraits, as he himself admitted, to lose that freshness with which they had been begun. But no one else in this country has painted so many portraits, that reach on the average so high a level of understanding of character, of sound construction and of varied invention in composition. It is not surprising that Gainsborough should have complained: 'The fellow is so damned various.' In much of this variety of invention Reynolds was inspired by the character of his sitter; for his genius was not of the most creative kind like that of Michelangelo or of Rubens, but resembled rather that of such receptive artists as Raphael or Van Dyck. He was like them also in possessing a gift which often accompanies the power of sympathetic portraiture, for taking constant hints from the works of other painters. (1)

Reynolds' young Self Portrait, where he is shading his eyes with his hand and gazing intently in front of him, gives some idea of his objective and earnestly observant attitude towards life. His dignified and courteous bearing

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appears in the later Self Portrait of 1773, where he is in doctor's robes and also in the more luminous and better preserved official Portrait of 1775 in the Pitti, Florence. (2)

The more intimate likeness with the hand to the ear reveals in addition the fundamental shyness, which was at the root of his reserve; while the humorous and more genial side of his nature is apparent in the older Self Portrait in spectacles of 1788. When to the evidence of these are added the records of Reynolds' life, a fairly complete impression is gained of a man of powerful intellect and of even temper, businesslike and intensely industrious, serious yet capable of humour, modest and able to take criticism in good part a man, who lived his life most fully and revealed his deepest feelings in his painting. (3)

Joshua Reynolds was the son of the Rev.(Reverend) Samuel Reynolds, master of the grammar school at Plympton Earl, Devon. As a child he was proficient at perspective; some illustrations fired his dramatic imagination and the reading of Jonathan Richardson's treatise (with its prophecies about the future of English Painting), aroused his ambition to become a painter. At twelve he painted a portrait of a certain Rev. Thomas Smart, which, though absurdly proportioned, shows in the plump face and surprised eyebrows the germs of a sense of character. (It was recently owned by Mr. Deble Boger of Plymouth.) (4)

In 1740, when he was seventeen, Joshua was sent to London to learn painting under Thomas Hudson, with whom he remained for two years. In 1743 he was at Plymouth Dock receiving modest commissions to paint naval officers. At about the same time he saw at Exeter and admired the portraits of one William Gandy, whose father had been Van Dyck's pupil. Of Gaudy's work not much is known; but Tom Taylor, who saw his portrait of Tobias Longden in the College Hall at Exeter, wrote enthusiastically of its broad and forcible painting. A remark of Candy's repeated to Reynolds made a great impression upon his mind: 'A picture ought to have a richness in its texture as if compounded of cream or cheese' a description which exactly applies to the paint in many of Reynolds' finest works. (5)

While in Devon in 1749 Reynolds made a lasting friendship with Commodore, afterwards Admiral, Keppel who took him on a voyage to Spain, Minorca and Algiers, finally leaving him in Rome. It was in Minorca that Reynolds fell from a horse and received a scar upon his lip. He remained in Rome until May 1752, spending most of his time industriously studying the great masters; while copying Raphael in the Vatican he caught a cold, which resulted in permanent deafness. In May 1752, he travelled through Perugia, Assisi and Arezzo to Florence and in July passed through Parma and Bologna to Venice, where he stayed only three weeks. In October of the same year he was back in England, returning first to Devon, and then early in 1753 settling in London with his sister as his housekeeper. His industry as a portrait painter soon brought him commissions. It was not until 1768 that the Royal Academy was inaugurated, with Reynolds as its President- a post which he was at first cautious

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in accepting, though he soon threw himself with ardour into his duties as exhibitor, instructor and organiser; so that it was largely owing to him that the Academy gained its lasting prestige. He continued to exhibit portraits and compositions and to deliver his famous 'Discourses' until 1790, when a majority of members meanly asked him to resign. They soon recanted, begging him to resume office, to which he, with characteristic good temper, consented. In 1791, however, increasing blindness forced on him a voluntary resignation. Then for the first time only his cheerfulness began to fail with his health and on February 23rd, 1792, he died. (6)

Style, technique, works

From the notes taken in Italy during his youth and from the Discourses, which date from 1769 to 1790, more is known about Reynolds' views upon painting than about those of most great painters. His tastes were wide for a painter of that period; today he seems to have paid too much attention to the Italians of the seventeenth century and too little to the Primitives; the only painter before Michelangelo whom he mentions in his notes is Masaccio. Yet he speaks of 'the simplicity and truth oftener found in the Old Masters who preceded the Great Age than ever it was in that Age.' In Rome he copied Rembrandt, Rubens, Raphael and Titian. He wrote of walking up and down the Sistine Chapel among the works of Michelangelo 'with great self-importance', and of Gorreggio's Holy Family and St. Jerome at Parma as giving him as great pleasure as ever he received.

As to how Reynolds studied, the notes that he took in Italy in his youth are enlightening. Considering his powers of composing with line and with colour, there is surprisingly little about these two elements in design. His knowledge here must have been largely instinctively acquired. There is rather more about technical matters like 'scumbling'; but most attention of all is paid to the distribution of light and shade. With this question of lighting is closely bound up the problem of using hard or soft contours in order to give objects the appearance of projection.

In his portraits painted soon after his return from Italy, the result of Reynolds' studies of the great painters of the past is often evident. The head of 1753 of his assistant Marchi with its gradated half-tones and thickly impasted high lights is in obvious technical imitation of Rembrandt, though the unemotional way of seeing the sitter is Reynolds' own. Sometimes with the influence of Rembrandt is mixed that of Van Dyck.

Some of Reynolds' portraits of this period, such as that of 1756 of Lady North suggest, especially in the painting of the dresses, that he had been taking technical hints from the work of Allan Ramsay, that accomplished Scotch painter, who was ten years his senior.

In many of Reynolds' portraits of the seventeen-fifties, the colour has fled from the flesh tints, leaving the faces and hands almost in monochrome. This matters less than might be expected, as can be seen in such varied examples as

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the Duke of Cumberland of 1757, Admiral Holbourne and his son of 1757, Captain Orme and Lady Anne Lennox Countess of Albemarle of 1759. In all these cases (except Captain Orme where the horse and background have darkened) the rest of the colour has not suffered at all, in the Cumberland a peculiarly rich effect having been produced by the juxtaposition of a red and blue that are both somewhat subdued. Moreover the modelling of the heads is always so complete that none of the characterisation has been lost; there is individual life in the gallant and adventurous Orme; in Cumberland, dispassionately portrayed, without emphasis on his brutality yet without flattery; in Admiral Holbourne, with his long sighted sailor's vision looking far out to sea: and in Lady Anne, that kindly but commanding aristocrat, who is looking up sharply from her lace work, ready if necessary to administer a rebuke.

Not many of Reynolds' portraits of women show as much insight as this of Lady Anne, who was the mother of his friend Keppel; clearly he has forgotten his rules of gallantry and has become interested in her intellectually, as though she were a man. The fine colour, the bold painting of the quilted skirt, the sound structure and splendid drawing of the hands, of the arms and of the sleeves that fall over them, all contribute to the satisfying completeness of the whole.

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To this period belong also several of Reynolds' best portraits of younger women. The two of 1759 of Kitty Fisher, with finish. In this masterpiece, a daring experiment in lighting has been used with wholly successful results. The famous beauty's face, protected by her wide hat, receives no direct sunlight, but only a strong reflected light beating upwards from the sunlit portions below: that is from her hands, from her skirt and especially from the white fur of the little dog upon her lap. Thus the shadows and lights occur on her features in the reverse of their usual positions, her upper lip and around her nostrils being light and her lower lip and forehead dark. This, far from being grotesque, adds

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piquancy to her charm, which is further increased by her pose; she appears just to have looked up on seeing a friend, at the same moment that a gleam of sun has burst through the clouds, shining even more brightly on her neck and breast than on her hands and wrist below. The peep of light sky through the trees on the left, though deliberately subdued in tone (because of secondary importance) is of value in giving the picture depth; without it the figure would make a dull symmetrical shape imprisoned in darkness.

The technique of the head is more difficult to follow, but much of the modelling appears to have depended upon the final glaze and the thumb may have been used as well as the brush. Particularly happy is the way in which the striped blue and white sleeves appear through the transparent and thinly glazed black shawl. Details like the lace on the sleeves, which look accidental, are skillfully designed in relation to the whole, and, while painted with enjoyable fluency, are also drawn with the utmost care in their relation to the arm beneath.

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Reynolds in fact has put forth all his powers in painting this blue-eyed beauty, making her more than the mere likeness of one woman of one period, so that she becomes a symbol of the mysterious and permanent fascination of womankind. At the same time the very completeness of the presentation, as compared with one of Gainsborough's portraits, has something in it impersonal.

In 1768 Reynolds painted Lady Pembroke and her son, a picture which has badly faded, but which still expresses tenderly the character of the shy little boy and of his gentle mother. In painting women without their children, or women who were not mothers, Reynolds was often less successful. It is doubtful if any of his later portraits of them are equal in charm to the Nelly O'Brien. He seems to have painted the ladies of the seventeen-seventies in a mood bordering on polite boredom.

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Reynolds had already produced several separate portraits of children (giving them as much individual sympathy as their elders) before this year 1773, in which he painted Miss Bowles and her dog, that delightful example of his capacity for understanding the feelings of a child and in this case the feelings also of the dog, who would certainly never have suffered such a squeezing so patiently from a grown up person. So entirely does the interest in the subject absorb the attention, that it is only afterwards that the formal beauties of the painting are discovered. The black parts of the dog's body have been swiftly swept in with a fluent brush, without any loss to the sureness of the drawing. With these thinly painted parts (which are usually the darks) may be contrasted the thickly loaded impasto, so characteristic of Reynolds, of such things as the white sleeve near the shoulder. The balance of light and shade is skillfully planned (as in the Nelly O'Brien), care being taken that the strongest light should fall on the face; but Reynolds has now added another means of subordination, not found in the earlier portrait, by the severe simplification of the dress in which minor folds are altogether eliminated.

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Reynolds' Strawberry Girl stands with a basket at her side and with an expression in her large eyes of the kind of sadness that can only be seen on the face of a child. This picture, the first version of which was completed about 1774, is painted in the lighter parts with that thick loaded impasto that Reynolds loved to use, an impasto much thicker and less loaded than Hogarth's, and comparable in quality with Devonshire cream.

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