The lure of likeness in Gainsborough's portraits

Magazine Antiques, Feb, 2003 by Nadia Tschenry

Thomas Gainsborough's artistic reputation has fluctuated widely in the more than two centuries since his death, and each of the genres he practiced--portrait, landscape, and fancy picture (1)--has at one time or another been favored. Even within one genre, most notably portraiture, appraisals of Gainsborough's work by collectors, artists, and connoisseurs have varied markedly within short periods of time. In the years around 1900, with late Victorian taste still dominant, his portraits were prized for their evocation of a lost aristocratic world of elegant ladies, privileged children, and leisured gentlemen. The purchase in 1921 of his Jonathan Buttall: The blue Boy (Pl. II) by the art dealer Joseph Duveen (1869-1939) for the highest price paid for a painting, and his subsequent sale of the picture to the railroad magnate Henry E. Huntington (1850-1927), marks the apogee of this nostalgically elitist veneration of Gainsborough. After World War I the English public and press mourned the exportation of The Blue Boy as a symbol of their decline in fortune. They found in the painting "something of the courtly grace and serene carriage of a people who knew themselves a great people." (2) In fact, as is now well known, The Blue Boy is not a representation of an aristocrat, but a portrait of an ironmonger, or hardware dealer, Jonathan Buttall, who was a friend of Gainsborough's and a well-to-do member of the middle class. His Van Dyck costume, carried more of an art historical than a social implication for Gainsborough and his contemporaries. The painting was not commissioned, but initiated by Gainsborough for exhibition in the 1770 Royal Academy show in London. It was intended to attract attention, demonstrate the artist's talent, and suggest to the public an association between himself and a great tradition of portraiture.

Less than fifteen years after the sale of The Blue Boy, those who attended lectures by the art critic Roger Fry (1866-1934) on the "Exhibition of British Art" at Burlington House in London heard an entirely different appraisal of Gainshorough as an artist devoted above all to compositional and pictorial strategies for giving life to a portrait. Fry singled out Gainsborough's portrait of Uvedale Tomkyns Price (P1. III) for its composition "very unusual for the time...in which the rectangles of picture and chair-back, re-echoed with variations in the portfolios and the drawing which the sitter holds, play so ingeniously around the firm set and rectangular mask of the man." (3) Not surprisingly, coming from the founder of modem formalist art criticism, this sounds more like an analysis of an avantgarde portrait of the later nineteenth century than a description of an eighteenth-century portrait. In discussing The Blue Boy, Fry characteristically focused entirely on the artist's technique, repeating a story (as f anciful in its own way as the earlier sentimental mythology surrounding the portrait) that Gainsborough painted it as a riposte to Joshua Reynolds's declaration "that the main mass of a picture could not be blue." (4)

The current traveling exhibition of Gainsborough's drawings and paintings, noted at the end of this article, will no doubt help to remove the rose-colored glasses through which The Blue Boy and other of his portraits have too long been viewed. The show is an unprecedented opportunity to see at firsthand the quality of the contribution Gainsborough made to the history of British portraiture, and to understand the professional and theoretical context in which they were produced.

Despite Fiy's zeal in finding Gainsborough a precursor of modem formalism, much of what he said not only rings true today but echoes observations of Gainshorough's contemporaries. When we look at such late portraits as the likeness of Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan (P1. VI) or of Mr. and Mrs. William Hallett (P1. VII), we can see what Fry meant when he described the "feeling... which is so constant with Gainshorough's portraits, that he must have come upon his sitter so quietly that nothing has been disturbed or changed," and "the illusion that we too have come into their presence unobserved and are about to meet them as naturally as if they were alive." (5) This addresses the period's preoccupation with the issue of likeness in portraiture and recalls the conceit, common in late eighteenth-century literature and particularly in relation to Gainsborough, of mistaking a portrait for the living person. (6) Fry's comment that "There is no feeling of the period about his portraits--we are not conscious of the hun dred and fifty years which separate us" (7) is related to another late eighteenth-century debate as to whether the use of modern dress in a portrait contributes to or detracts from the goal of attaining likeness. In refusing to view the portraits nostalgically Fry affirms Gainsborough's choice of what Joshua Reynolds called "temporary fashion" (8) over what Gainsborough termed the "poetical impossibilities" that Reynolds used when he gave his sitters an allegorical guise and classicizing garb. (9) Many critics felt that the sense of likeness gained through the use of contemporary dress diminished gradually as time went by and fashions changed. Even Gainsborough himself wavered in his insistence on modern dress and clothed many of his later subjects in Van Dyck fancy dress.