Thomas Gainsborough : his life, work, friends, and sitters

Preface

CONSIDERING the importance of the position occupied by Thomas Gainsborough in the British school of painting, surprisingly few details of his life have been preserved. His contemporaries appreciated and accepted his pictures without concerning themselves much with the man who produced them, and he had been dead sixty-eight years before any adequate attempt to write the history of his life and work was carried to completion. It is true that an eccentric neighbour of Gainsborough, in the person of Governor Philip Thicknesse, published a short memoir of the painter in the year of his death ; true also that the interesting antiquary, John Thomas Smith, sometime Keeper of the Prints at the British Museum, and author of the amusing Life of Nollekens and other curious works, made an effort to collect information nine years later. But twenty-eight pages in Allan Cunningham’s Lives of the British Painters , published in 1829, remained the sole authority upon the career of the painter until nearly seventy years after his death.

Cunningham’s Life is necessarily incomplete and unconvincing, and it was not until the middle years of the nineteenth century that anything like an adequate

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PREFACE and connected account of Gainsborough’s career appeared in the little volume written by the Fulchers, father and son. The elder of these gentlemen, as a fellow-townsman of the painter, a scholar at the same grammar school, and a devoted admirer of his art, undertook the pious office of placing the main facts of his life upon record. He received and acknowledged help from most of the sources of information available at that late date ; from Gainsborough’s own family, in the persons of the Rev. Gainsborough Gardiner, Mr. Gainsborough Dupont, and Mrs. Sarah Browne ; from Mr. Sheepshanks, the collector, and from Mr. C. R. Leslie, R.A., and Mr. R. J. Lane, A.R.A. Death, however, brought Mr. Fulcher’s labours to a close in 1855, and his unfinished task, taken up by his son, was carried to completion in the following year.

The art of Gainsborough has since occupied the energies of many able writers, but, with the exception of some allusions in letters, memoirs, and lives of his contemporaries which have appeared from time to time, little has been added to our knowledge of the details of his life, and Fulcher’s interesting volume seems likely to remain the chief authority.

Contents

CHAP. PAGE

I. BIRTH, PARENTAGE, AND BOYHOOD — 1727-1745 . I

IV. BATH — GAINSBOROUGH AND JACKSON . . 96

Chapter I

BIRTH, PARENTAGE, AND BOYHOOD— 1727-1745 HOMAS GAINSBOROUGH was born in the parish of St. Gregory Sepulchre, Sudbury, Suffolk, in the year 1727. The exact day of his birth is uncertain, but his baptism at the Independent Meeting- House on May 14th of the same year seems to fix the date with reasonable accuracy. He was the son of John Gainsborough of that town, and of Elizabeth, his wife, whose maiden name was Burroughs. John is represented by his biographers as a Nonconformist, and Elizabeth as of the Establishment; but as when John came to die he was buried in the parish churchyard of St. Gregory, it is possible that the particular creeds of the pair were the reverse of those generally accepted. On the other hand, Mrs. Gainsborough had certainly a brother in holy orders, the Rev. Humphrey Burroughs, who conducted the local Grammar School. The point is not of vast importance, but it may be accepted that one at least of Thomas’s parents was of the Independent persuasion.

Both family and local tradition present John Gainsborough as a remarkable man. Cunningham reports the local recollection of “ a stately and personable man, with something mysterious in his history, for the pastoral and timid rustics of Suffolk suspected him of carrying a dagger under his clothes.” Fulcher repeats the family tradition that John was “a fine old man who wore his hair parted carefully, and was remarkable for the whiteness and regularity of his teeth.” He was accustomed to wear a sword, which we may take to be significant of some social pretensions in those days, and was reputed an adept in its use, and that with both hands. It was this sword perhaps that became a dagger in the rustic echo reported by Cunningham.

From deeds of conveyance and other documents relating to local property in Sudbury which had been handled by old Mr. Gainsborough, it is clear that he was connected with the staple woollen trade of that town, weaving, and the production of crapes — arts which had been brought to the Suffolk people by the Flemish weavers who had settled among them as early as the reign of Edward the Third, and under the patronage of that monarch. Thus in 1722 John Gainsborough is described as a “ milliner ” ; in a mortgage deed of three years later he appears as a clothier, and in 1 7 3 5 he is called a crapemaker. John appears to have added the cheerless occupation of making shrouds to the other branches of his business. Among many enactments of doubtful value passed in the reign of Charles the Second, was one which ordained that all Englishmen should be buried in a shroud of English manufacture, as a means of encouraging one of the national industries. The making of these articles had first taken root at Coventry, apparently, whence John Gainsborough imported the secret. This he managed to confine to his own establishment for some years, during which he found his monopoly very profitable.

Tradition asserts again that this hearty manufacturer was not debarred by his reputable character from indulging on occasion in the then popular diversion of smuggling, and that he found his occupation of shroud merchant useful in that pastime. “ On one occasion, when in his untaxed cart, which contained besides samples of the dresses for the dead a keg of smuggled brandy for the comfort of the living, some vague information of his supposed delinquencies was given to a Revenue officer, who on a bright moonlight night took occasion to inquire what he had in his cart. ‘ I’ll show you,’ was the ready answer, and catching up a shroud he enveloped his tall figure in the ghostly dress, to the astonishment and speedy departure of his weak-nerved nocturnal visitor.”

John Gainsborough is represented as a man in a large way of business, and of an enterprising turn which took him at times into France and Holland. His reputation also was that of a man who suffered many losses from an easy good-nature, which made it difficult for him to press poor debtors for payment. He was ahead of his times, too, in refusing to take “ toll ” of his spinners’ earnings, by some operation of truck which seems to have been a custom of the place. These virtues may have helped to bring about the disaster which overtook him in 1733, when he was gazetted a bankrupt.

Of Mrs. Gainsborough we know less. She is described as kind and indulgent to all her children and somewhat proud of her sons, as well as a woman of wellcultivated mind, and a noted painter of flowers. Fulcher opines that Thomas may have acquired, if he did not inherit, his love of art from seeing his mother engaged in that accomplishment. She affectionately encouraged him in his juvenile attempts at drawing, and lived to see her fondest wishes realised in her son’s acknowledged eminence in the pursuit the love of which she had probably been the means of first awakening. Gainsborough was high in fame at Bath when his mother died, in 1769, and was buried at the Independent Meeting-House at Sudbury.

This interesting couple had a quiverful — five sons, of whom Thomas was the youngest, and four daughters. We know little of some members of this large family, but, from some particulars which have survived of the two eldest, John and Humphrey, we judge them to have been in many ways a notable race. John, the eldest, appears to have been one of those visionary men of talent who need but a little ballast to become geniuses. He had a prodigious turn for the mechanical arts, and from his youth up was employed upon endless projects of a mechanical nature. He was known in the village as “ Scheming Jack,” but his reputation was also that of a man who seldom carried anything to completion. Years later, Thomas Gainsborough used to declare that he never knew his brother finish anything. “ Curse it,” was the Schemer’s invariable explanation of his failures ; “ some little thing was wrong : if I had but gone on with it, I am sure I should have succeeded, but a new scheme came across me.”

Jack’s first notable performance was the construction of a flying machine with wings of metal, in which he essayed a public flight, but succeeded only in reaching the ground from the roof of a summer house, without hurt, but amidst the derision of the assembled villagers. One reads of him later as painting a signboard for a local publican, and taking his revenge for what he considered a mean bating of his price by painting the Bull in distemper, which disappeared after the first shower. What his means were we do not know, but it is certain that they were usually dissipated by the purchase of material for his numberless experiments, and benefactions from his brother Thomas in the prosperity of later years went the same way. Governor Thicknesse has left an account of this unfortunate, which is evidently drawn from the life.

“ I never saw John Gainsborough but once, and that is more than twenty years ago. But passing through Sudbury, where he has always resided, I visited him as a friend of his brother. Previous to seeing him I sat an hour with his wife, and asked her whether Mr. Gainsborough, her brother, did not assist them. ‘ Oh yes/ said she, ‘ he often sends us five guineas, but the instant my husband gets it he lays it all out in brass-work to discover the longitude/ At that instant her longitudinal husband appeared ; he would not suffer me even to tell him my name, or that I was a friend of his brother, but brought forth his curious brass-work, and, after showing me how nearly it was completed, observed that he only wanted two guineas to buy brass to finish it. I could hardly determine whether his deranged imagination or his wonderful ingenuity was most to be admired, but I informed him that I had not capacity to conceive the genius of his unfinished work, and therefore wished him to show me such as was completed. He then showed me a cradle which rocked itself, a cuckoo which would sing all the year round, and a wheel that turned in a still bucket of water. He informed me that he had visited Mr. Harrison and his timepiece, ‘ but/ said he, ‘ Harrison made no account of me in my shabby coat, for he had lords and dukes with him. After he had shown the lords that a great motion of the machine would noways affect its regularity, I whispered to him to give it a gentle motion. Harrison started, and in return whispered me to stay, as he wanted to speak to me after the rest of the company were gone/ I then,” continues Thicknesse, “ took my leave of this eccentric and unfortunate man without giving him the two guineas solicited, and now lament that he has lost the aid of his excellent brother, for, alas, without aid he cannot subsist, and must be verging upon, if not past, fourscore years of age, for he said he was several years older than his brother Thomas.”

It is possible that the poor flighty John was nearer the accomplishment of one at least of his undertakings than it seemed. This Harrison mentioned by Thicknesse was the winner of the Government premium of ^20,000 for the production of a chronometer which should enable the longitude to be found within certain limits of accuracy stated in the conditions of the offer. John had evidently divined some of the difficulties to be overcome when he recommended Harrison the test of the “ gentle motion.” We read, too, that he had himself sent a piece of his own manufacture to the proper quarter, and that “ although the result did not fully answer his speculations, a sum of money was awarded to him for his ingenuity.” Our last glimpse of John Gainsborough reveals him as an old man standing, by the hour together, drawing diagrams with a stick in the sand on the floor of his house at Sudbury. He determined finally that to prove his theories as to the proper method of reckoning longitude he must go to the East Indies, but he only got as far as London on that journey, where he died. Nearly every room of his house at Sudbury was full of unfinished models of brass and tin.

From what little is known of the second son, Humphrey, it seems clear that there was a strain of mechanical ability in the family, which in his case produced results more practical than in that of the unstable John. Humphrey was a Nonconformist minister in charge of a chapel or meeting-house at Henley-on- Thames, and his experiments in mechanics were the amusement of the leisure left by his duties as a minister — duties which were always conscientiously performed. It is claimed for Humphrey Gainsborough that he invented the apparatus for condensing steam in a chamber separate from the cylinder of the then new invention of the steam engine, and that his invention was recognised and patented as his own by James Watt. Edgeworth, the father of the authoress, knew Humphrey well, and was a great believer in his ability. “ I never knew a man of a more inventive mind,” said he. The circumstances of his claim to the invention of the condenser are thus recorded by Fulcher: — “It was stated by his family and friends that Watt owed to him one of his great and fundamental improvements — that of condensing the steam in a separate vessel. Certain it is that Mr. Gainsborough had constructed a working model of a steam engine to which his discoveries were applied, and that a stranger, evidently well acquainted with mechanics and supposed to be connected with Watt as an engineer, was on a visit to Henley, to whom he unsuspectingly showed his model and explained its novelties. His relatives have assured the author that such was the fact, and that the circumstance of having thus lost the credit of the discovery made a deep and melancholy impression upon his mind.”

The evidence is not conclusive, of course, but a passage in Thicknesse appears as a corroboration. “ Mr. Gainsborough gave me, after the death of his clergyman brother, the model of his steam engine ; that engine alone would have furnished a fortune to all the Gainsboroughs and their descendants, had not that unsuspicious good-hearted man let a cunning designing artist see it, who surreptitiously carried it off in his mind’s eye.” Watt took out his first patent for condensing in 1769, and renewed it in 1775. Humphrey Gainsborough died in 1776.

Humphrey left other evidence of his ability as an inventor besides this claim to the invention of the condenser. He was, for example, an ingenious diallist, and Thicknesse mentions a sundial of his construction which would show the hour in any part of the world without the necessity of wheels and calculators usually fitted to such instruments. Thicknesse states that he presented this curious timepiece to the British Museum, where, however, it is certainly not displayed at the present moment. Humphrey, too, anticipated the modern fireproof safe, and presented one of his boxes to a friend, in whose hands it received a very successful test. This gentleman’s house was burned to the ground shortly afterwards, and the box and its contents recovered from the ruins uninjured. The Society of Arts, too, gave him a prize of ^50 for a tide-mill. Altogether, one thinks of Humphrey as a notable man, who perhaps failed to find his proper vocation in the Independent Methodist Church. Portraits of both John and Humphrey by their brother Thomas were exhibited in the Grosvenor Gallery in 1885.

Of the other sons of old John Gainsborough we know that Matthias died untimely as a youth from an accident, and that Robert lived in Lancashire. Robert’s calling is not mentioned, and we have no means of knowing whether he shared the family ability. Enterprise was not altogether lacking in his character : as Fulcher records, “ it is current that he eloped with his first wife, was married twice, and had three children.”

The daughters all married. Mary, the eldest, became the wife of a Dissenting minister at Bath named Gibbon, and the few letters of Thomas Gainsborough to his kinsfolk which have been preserved were written to this sister. Susan married a Mr. Gardiner, also of Bath, and her descendant, the Rev. Edward Gardiner, is the possessor of several portraits and etchings by the painter. The two other sisters, Sarah and Elizabeth, both lived and died in their native town of Sudbury. Elizabeth married a Mr. Bird ; Sarah, a Mr. Dupont. Sarah’s son, Gainsborough Dupont, later became assistant to his uncle, and before his death at thirty years of age in 1797 achieved some success as a painter and engraver. He left several portraits of more or less notable personages of his day, including Mr. William Pitt, Lord Howe, and Robert Preston, who, in giving the great Minister periodical dinners at Greenwich, perhaps initiated the Ministerial whitebait dinner at the Ship, which has expired only in our own times. Dupont painted also Hector Rose, the Deputy Master of Trinity House in his day, and a portrait group of the Elder Brethren which still hangs in that building. He would probably, however, have been more notable as an engraver in mezzotinto than as a painter, had he lived. As it was, he left eleven excellent plates from works by his uncle — plates, in which, as Mr. Chaloner Smith points out, not only the manner but the very spirit of the painter is translated. One of the best known of these is that of the youthful St. Leger. It was that great authority’s opinion, that, had Dupont attained his prime and continued the scraping of these admirable plates, his prints would have done much to have established the reputation of Gainsborough as the chief painter of English feminine grace and beauty in the place of Reynolds.

We have indicated the chief personal influences which may have helped to mould the character of Thomas Gainsborough — a good - natured and genial father, elder brothers of energy certainly, and of some practical ability in the mechanical sciences as known in their day, a tender mother, and four sisters older than himself. The commercial failure of his father when he was only six years of age seems to hint at straitened means in his family, but such disasters were more easily repaired in a time when there was less struggle for existence than there is in these later days, and there is no hint of any breaking up of the family home ; on the contrary, it is clear, from the following announcement in the London Gazette for October 16th of 1753, the year of the bankruptcy, that the commercial troubles of John Gainsborough were not long in settlement : —

“ Whereas a Commission of Bankrupt was lately awarded and issued against John Gainsborough of Sudbury in the County of Suffolk clothier ; this is to give notice that the said Commission is superseded under the Great Seal of Great Britain. Therefore all persons who are indebted to the said John Gainsborough, or have any effects in their hands, are forthwith to pay and deliver the same to the said John Gainsborough, or they will be sued by Mr. Henry Hanyford Attorney-at- Law, in Friday Street, London.”

The incident, however, is significant of the early necessity for each of the sons to choose a means of living, and that without much hope of any help that might come with a patrimony, however modest. That of Thomas was soon determined by his evident leaning towards graphic art.

Thomas is mentioned by one of his biographers as the only member of the family who was a charge upon the parental resources. The daughters were all married in due season. Humphrey was in his ministry, and the schemes of John doubtless provided in some way for the needs of that ingenious mechanic. But Thomas’s years of dependence upon his father were certainly not prolonged beyond the ordinary, and his parents, like the sensible people they evidently were, had no hesitation in letting the boy follow his natural bent, which was not long in declaring itself. Among the few known facts of his boyhood, that of an early artistic precocity is very

BRAMFORD, NEAR IPSWICH

BIRTH, PARENTAGE, AND BOYHOOD n clearly established. Allan Cunningham has described him as having made some progress in sketching from nature at ten years old, and as being at twelve a confirmed painter. It seems certain that at a still earlier age his artistic tastes had attracted the notice of his parents and guardians. Fulcher tells us that, as soon as he had been placed under the ferule of his uncle Burroughs, who educated the Sudbury youth at the Grammar School, Tom was accustomed to employ the hours which should have been occupied with his grammar and sums in filling his books and those of his companions with the juvenile drawings with which genius so often declares itself. There was another boy named Joshua Reynolds engaged in so decorating Latin grammars at Plympton at much the same time. Young Tom Gainsborough is said to have had his own exercises done by his schoolfellows in exchange for his artistic productions, with the result that Uncle Burroughs was often completely deceived, and the young scapegrace provided with leisure to pursue his artistic essays unheeded and untroubled. Fulcher remembered the old schoolhouse, which was standing in 1855, and saw young Gainsborough’s initials cut deep into the woodwork, as well as a caricature of the master, which may have been by the same hand. But the boy’s ambitions were by no means bounded by such opportunities as lay within the four walls of the schoolhouse. There was no greater treat for the lad than to set off on a long summer day’s ramble with his pencils and paper through the wooded country which lay around his native town. On one particular occasion he had applied for leave to make some such excursion from his uncle, and had been refused, when he hit on a means of escaping that disappointment. The boy returned- with a paper bearing the words “ Give Tom a holiday ” in a very convincing imitation of his father’s handwriting, and bearing the parental signature. Fulcher relates that Burroughs was completely deceived, and allowed young Gainsborough the day for his sketching expedition ; but having some later doubts on the point he communicated with old John, who was thus informed of the misapplied talents of his son. Upon being shown the forgery he exclaimed, “ Tom will one day be hanged.” The boy, however, brought back such a collection of sketches as the result of the day’s truancy that the elder relented in his righteous anger, and, recognising the promise of his son’s talent on the spot, “ changed his mind, and with a father’s pride declared, ‘ Tom will be a genius.’ ”

John Thomas Smith characteristically improves upon the story of the forgery. He declares that the family warming-pan was found full of orders for holidays forged in his father’s name by the ingenious Tom.

These legends, however, true or false, half true or exaggerated, all present a general truth — the boy’s love for nature and his diligence in its study. Gainsborough himself has left it on record that he sketched every tree, gate, stump, and stile within ten miles of his home until he knew every detail of that pleasant country by heart. All these products of his love he treasured up — “ sketches of trees, rocks, shepherds, and pastoral scenes, drawn on slips of paper or on old dirty letters,” as Thicknesse, to whom he gave a handful, describes them. That eccentric gentleman indeed laid claim to the first effort Gainsborough made with a pencil — a group of trees which he describes as “ a wonderful performance, and not unworthy a place in one of the painter’s best landscapes.” We should imagine either the critical faculty of Mr. Thicknesse or his chronology to be at fault in this matter. More convincing is the information he has recorded, that the boy at first was careful to keep his early sketches and studies, which he was accustomed to speak of as “ his riding school,” until his growing proficiency made him discontented with his juvenile efforts. Then he presented them broadcast to his friends, including Mr. Thicknesse and a lady in London, who rather unappreciatively papered a room with them.

We have examined, as fully as the scanty material available will allow, the personal surroundings in which young Gainsborough’s character developed : in the case of an artist whose first love at least was the fervent admiration of landscape, a consideration of the physical surroundings in which that character developed is not less important. Fulcher goes out of his way to belittle the antique character of the Sudbury of Gainsborough’s youth, and the boy’s love of its quaintness : “ The dilapidated and antique buildings which encumbered and disfigured the streets of his native town were, in the eyes of the painter, positive beauties. ... Its then unpaved thoroughfares were at irregular intervals encroached upon by rude porches ornamented with carvings still more uncouth, antediluvian monsters and zoologydefying griffins whose antiquity was their only recommendation.” But Mr. Fulcher wrote in the days when the artistic ideas which were crystallised in the Great Exhibition of 1851 were in full blast, and may be forgiven much. We may be thankful that Gainsborough’s ideas in art had birth in different surroundings, and at this moment no apology is needed for his evident love for the mediaeval character of his native town.

The house in which the Gainsborough family lived had been formerly an inn known as the Black Horse, and was one of those old-fashioned houses dating from the thirteenth century where the upper storeys overhung the lower. A local Act of 1825, which compelled the inhabitants to build houses which should be made

“ perpendicular to the foundations thereof,” and no doubt began the changes which have quite transformed Sudbury, is the occasion of a mild joke by Mr. Fulcher. Sir Robert Peel, in discussing the disfranchisement of the borough, referred to this local Act “ as a most extraordinary piece of legislation to compel people to build their houses upright ! Mr. Fulcher opines that the great statesman’s thoughts were running more upon the bribery and corruption of the place than its overhanging storeys, and that he imagined these political backslidings of the people appeared even in the architecture of their houses.

Gainsborough’s house had a spacious and well-planted orchard at the back. Near the orchard stood the ruins of the palace of Simon Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury, the prelate who was unfortunately beheaded in 1375 by the rabble in Wat Tyler’s rebellion, and whose head may still be seen in good preservation in the adjacent church of St. Gregory.

Sudbury has increased since Gainsborough’s day to a town of seven thousand inhabitants, and it is perhaps vain to look for any great resemblance between its surroundings to-day and those of nearly two centuries ago. Yet there are broad natural features in that country which are unchangeable. There is the position of the county as the most easterly part of the kingdom, exposed to all the winds that come from that quarter, unsheltered by any considerable range of hills — conditions which make it at once the driest and the bleakest of the English counties. Its general flatness, the abundance of its waterways, and its cold and uncomfortable geological formation, give Suffolk a very distinct character of its own. All these features are permanent, and preserve, in many of its most striking aspects, the country in which young Gainsborough first ran about with his sketch-book. Thus the exposed nature of the country and the absence of considerable hills result in a prodigality of the beauty of open sky and effects of atmosphere which certainly had their effect upon the boy, and influence much of his early landscape. The bleak nature of its plains and uplands, again, contrasts very markedly with the fertility of its river valleys.

Sudbury lies in the upper part of one of the chief of these valleys — that of the Stour, the river which divides Suffolk from Essex, and at the highest navigable point of the river. At Sudbury begins that extensive area of cold clay which stretches unbroken for some twenty-five miles to Ipswich — a soil capable of growing prodigious crops of wheat under good management in dry seasons, but normally cold and inhospitable to live upon. Near the town itself, however, the clay softens into the alluvial soil of the river valley with its accompaniment of willow, alder, and elm in the woodlands, and of pasture with luxuriant hedgerow instead of tilled arable in the fields. The natural features of the Stour valley twenty miles farther down the river are familiar to most Englishmen in the paintings of Constable. But the scenery changes much for the better before Dedham is reached, and in the neighbourhood of Sudbury we look in vain for the fertility and graciousness of the pastoral country which that artist painted so convincingly.