ART: Two centuries on, the paint still looks fresh
Gainsborough at Tate Britain
The enjoyment of art is as much a social pursuit as a personal one, and taste more a matter of experience and tuition than anything innate. So when, for instance, Sir Joshua Reynolds stands up before the students of the Royal Academy and says the following –
If ever this nation should produce genius sufficient to acquire to us the honourable distinction of an English School, the name of Gainsborough will be transmitted to posterity, in the history of the Art, among the very first of that rising name
– and goes on to spell out what he believes to be best and worst about his contemporary and competitor, we, like them, should take note – while noting at the same time, with some amusement, how fashions in such things change, and how one generation values exactly the qualities lamented most loudly by another. Knowledge need not be the enemy of experience. Art can ‘speak for itself’, but the more idiomatic our grasp of its visual language, the more profound the conversation will be.
There is, clearly, much about Thomas Gainsborough’s work that appeals instantly, without the need for much sophistication. Unlike Reynolds, whose reputation is haunted by his Discourses and whose work is thus tinted by his own theories, Gainsborough’s pleasures are both more sensual and more practical. His colour is arresting. The ethereal girls, dashing men and high-spirited dogs all command attention. In Gainsborough’s best paintings, the handling is so fresh and yet so eccentric that one has the slightly shocking sense of collision with an individual painter, an individual sensibility, rather than a school or genre. But these are the easy pleasures, and easy pleasures are rarely the best. There’s much to be said for discovering why these pictures were painted, what contemporaries might have seen in them, who the subjects were and how the works have faired amidst the vicissitudes of taste during the centuries separating Gainsborough’s time from ours. Such knowledge does not necessarily deaden the experience of spending time with a painting, any more than a fund of background knowledge deadens time spent with an old friend. This is why curators of art exhibitions generally feel the need to provide such information, not least when the subject is a painter as well known and widely loved as Gainsborough.
It comes as a disappointment, then, that Tate Britain’s new Gainsborough exhibition – an event that has pulled together 180 works, constituting a stunning and apt survey of Gainsborough’s work – has to be experienced through a haze of some of the most witless curatorial commentary seen in a major public space within living memory. The curatorial commentary is wretched. Visitors are given little factual information about the subjects, little about the circumstances of commissions, little about the critical reception given to each painting, little about the histories of individual works. Instead of such information, the wall panels and catalogue serve up generalised, unsupported, sometimes fanciful assertions about how these works are supposed to look. And I do mean ‘are supposed to look’ in the present tense. For all the modish desire – in itself, very dated – to embrace relativism and to fight free of the aesthetic standards of the present day, the commentary is insistently couched in the present tense, e.g. ‘the idea communicated is that ...’ or ‘he is dressed sombrely to show that his is a thoughtful sensibility ...’.
The effect of this reminds one of a particularly unsuccessful Open University lecturer insinuating himself between canvas and viewer, droning flatly about social history while blocking the view of the painting. More seriously, as Richard Dorment has pointed out in his fine review of this exhibition, where the curators have benefited from scholarly research done by others on these topics, they have frequently garbled it and sometimes failed to acknowledge such contributions. Thus the resulting exhibition leaves little sense of what Gainsborough was like or what he hoped to achieve. The tone is patronising and prim – so much so, indeed, that I was tempted to scribble corrections onto one or two of the most gratingly silly, politically-correct, aesthetically purblind labels.
So it’s very much an exhibition of two halves, with an enormous gulf opening up between the exhibition as a visual feast, and the slurry of crude cod-marxist and cod-feminist interpretation that drips from most of the curatorial commentary. Certainly, there are places in which the hang itself is almost disconcertingly good. For instance, walking into the second part of the first room, the walls of which are painted a soft pumpkin colour, one gets a sudden sideways glimpse into the long, central gallery which is painted a greenish-blue. Looking from this warm coloured one into the cooler one beyond, one sees, framed by the doorway, Gainsborough’s magnificent Linley Sisters, whose blue and ochre-gold dresses shine out from the darkness of the landscape behind them. The heart skips a beat. It’s just the sort of sudden, sensual shock of which Gainsborough is a master. It takes a very familiar image and makes it surprising. Whoever arranged this was thinking with his eyes, not his A-level economics texts, and the result is one of the many delights of the show. Nor is it hard to think of other examples of happy curatorial decisions. The long gallery, mentioned a moment ago, encourages promenading, lingering on the long benches and the odd flirtation, and as such recalls (to the extent this sort of cube-like space can do) the great public exhibition spaces of the Royal Academy in the age of Reynolds. The copies of eighteenth century newspapers, including reviews of exhibitions in which Gainsborough participated, are a nice touch. Another good choice was the decision to put the Royal Collection’s great Diana and Actaeon, in a low, dark-green, dimly-lit room, underscoring its strange air of secrecy and personal obsession.
The overall choice of works, too, deserves commendation. Gainsborough was a prolific painter but also an uneven and occasionally sloppy one. There are many of his works on public display in this country, and no shortage of Gainsborough-centred exhibitions. Tate Britain has managed to secure some superb loans, not only from UK collections but also from the United States, Australia and elsewhere, ensuring that well-known works get a boost from proximity with something less familiar. Many of Gainsborough’s most spectacular paintings are on show here, from the absolutely romantic triumph of Mrs Richard Brinsley Sheridan to sentimentality co-mingled with sharp observation in Girl with Pigs. There are also plenty of crowd-pleasers. Tristram and Fox, a painting of the Gainsboroughs’ two little dogs which apparently hung over the mantle of their London house, is so full of all the things that make little dogs loveable – bright eyes, prominent teeth, palpably wet nose, excitable temperament – that is all too easy to forget what a bravura act of painting goes into conjuring up all of this. There’s a lovely page of drawings of a cat doing cat-like things, such as grooming and sleeping. The marvellous Henry 3rd Duke of Buccleuch (1770) is, perhaps the best of them all. It is as much a portrait of the handsome, soft-coated Dandie Dinmont as it is of the mild-featured young man, half-smiling and with the Order of the Thistle half-obscured on his lapel, who wraps the dog in a comradely embrace.
This is, however, as good an opportunity as any to illustrate the tiresome, tin-eared, nannyish tone of the commentary here. Of the Duke of Buccleuch, we are told that
With his kindly expression, gentle tilt of his head and affectionate embrace of his pet dog, the duke is presented not as a proud or powerful nobleman but as a ‘man of feeling’. It is one of the earliest and most striking portraits of the period that set out [sic] to capture this notion of sensibility and predated by a year the publication of Henry Mackenzie’s novel, The Man of Feeling, in 1771 ....
Yet where this isn’t stating the obvious, it is simply foolish. If, for instance, the Duke really is shown with a ‘kindly expression’ and ‘gentle tilt of his head’, why can’t the viewers be expected to notice this for themselves? Nor does it seem too much to suggest that Gainsborough could have taken as read that his subject was one of the greatest landowners in the country, meaning that the decision to present him ‘not as a proud or powerful nobleman’ was arguably a gesture of crushing snobbery, replete with confidence in the brutal fact that the name, restrained blue coat and partly-veiled decoration would make a point about aristocratic stature in the way that no overdressed social-climber, swathed in bright clothes and studio airs, would have been able to do. And as for that ‘man of feeling’ business, and the assertion that the portrait ‘set out to capture this notion of sensibility’, I’d have preferred some concrete evidence about this history of the painting, rather than the bald ascription of intention on the part of the painter or the subject, based on little more, apparently, than the curators’ organisational imperatives. Actually it seems less likely that contemporaries would have associated this painting with an unpublished novel than with a long tradition of portraits of male aristocrats, some of which feature that broken tree, or that restrained dress and subtle glimpse of decoration, or indeed the dog – Titian’s portrait of Federico II Gonzaga, for instance, spring to mind. But why not simply give more information about the Duke and perhaps his dog? Could it not be the case that perhaps the Duke simply wanted his dog shown in the picture because he liked his dog, or that Gainsborough suggested including it because it would make a strong painting, as indeed it did? But the whole pressure here is to make a marvellously individual, quirky, memorable painting conform safely to some type. Frankly, supplying the name of the dog would have been more to the point.
Specific historical background can illuminate even very fine pictures. The twin portraits of Edward, Second Viscount Ligonier of Clonmell and his wife Penelope, Viscountess Ligonier (1771) are very different from that of the Duke of Buccleuch, yet at the same time could not have been painted by anyone other than Gainsborough. Lord Ligonier, in scarlet and gold, is shown leaning against his horse in an autumnal setting, bathed in gold light, alert and self-possessed. Lady Ligonier, in contrast, leans against a gilt plinth on which stands a bronze of a dancing nude bacchante; framed by a brilliant scarlet curtain, Lady Ligonier rests one elbow on the plinth, while in her other hand, balanced against her curving hip, she holds an inked-up pen. She’s beautiful, but also comes across as headstrong and perhaps even dangerous. Her elegantly classicised but also elegantly distrait costume, like the wild sky and the soaring curtain behind her, or indeed the loose and almost frantic handling of the fabric of her skirt – very free scumbling of white over gold – hints at rather more passion than some men might welcome, while her look seems to be daring someone to do something they probably should not. And indeed, a few months after the portrait was painted, Viscountess Ligonier began an affair with an Italian count, setting in train a chain of events that culminated in a duel in Green Park, a suit for ‘criminal conversation’, and a divorce. Given that the two portraits were hanging in the Royal Academy at the time the duel took place, the high drama of the brushwork must have been more than justified. The catalogue provides some of this background, while the wall panels seem more intent on suggesting the limitations imposed on Lady Ligonier by the fact of her gender. But since the pictures are so much more charismatic than the labels, the gaze soon drifts back to the pictures themselves – and here, for the moment, at least, the complex relationship between scarlet, gold and black keeps the marriage between the two canvasses alive, if alarmingly livid.
The masterpieces are, quite properly, dispersed throughout an exhibition which, while turning thematic in parts, still retains a broadly chronological organisation. Thus we follow Gainsborough from a touchingly artless self-portrait, aged 12 or so, painted perhaps just before leaving Suffolk for London and immersion into the professional art world, until his death from cancer in 1788, aged 61. The journey is more interesting than it would be in the case of some other painters, if for no other reason than because Gainsborough, although his work could sometimes look mannered and more like ‘a Gainsborough’ than anything else, never stopped experimenting.
This often injects an awkwardness into his work (for instance, the convoluted pose in Ann Ford, later Mrs Philip Thicknesse), but as well as the failures (of which there are virtually none here) there were triumphant successes. Mr and Mrs Andrews (c. 1750) is the first of these, self-confident in its sublime weirdness, which infuses everything from the acid colours to the frightening light effects, the juxtaposition of carefully-worked passages with the vaguest washes and the haptic treatment of line. I suspect we love it more than its contemporaries did, or at least for different reasons. Certainly, its flatness and its relaxed artificiality look towards modernist preoccupations that Gainsborough cannot have imagined. Mr and Mrs Hallet (1785) (not present in the Tate Britain phase of the show, but accessible enough at the National Gallery) demonstrates the apotheosis of a young couple into Gainsborough figures, doomed to wander forever through a Gainsborough landscape, in an image which is at once wholly unreal and wholly convincing, if only through an internal integrity that links the fluffy big forms of Mrs Hallet’s skirt and hair with those of her dog and the marvellous tree behind her; those sensitive, civilised, mask-like faces float in a sea of masterful brushstrokes, as elegant and incidentally sad as anything Boucher ever painted. (The fact that the catalogue refers to the confection accompanying the pair as a ‘hound’ tells one all one needs to know about the catalogue.) And finally, the late work Diana and Actaeon (1784-86) looks like nothing else on earth. It is half-way between late Titian and Cezanne, poetically as well as chronologically – a strange fantasy of colour, line and brushwork apparently cut free from anything other than an amorphous eroticism so frankly expressed and so rawly individual that it is almost unnerving to see.
Thusfar this review has dealt almost exclusively with portraits. There are, in fact, quite a few landscapes in the exhibition. Gainsborough derived his vision of landscape less from his native Suffolk than from the canvasses of Ruisdael, Rubens and Claude, among others. (I am mystified by those who suggest that his landscapes have anything to do with ‘nature’ – since when did English nature look like that?) My reaction to the landscapes was, I have to admit, coloured by that of the friend who accompanied me to the show, who alluded more than once – and not favourably, either – to their ‘so what’ quality. And somehow it was difficult to make a case for them. While I found a quality agreeably balanced between peacefulness and melancholy in those burnt-umber shadows, the statuesque cattle, the stylised weeping trees and caligraphic brooks, it was hard to go further than that. Is there something about present-day London that is basically out of sympathy with seventeenth-century Holland or indeed much of eighteenth-century England – something in our relationship with nature, or perhaps even something about what we want from art? Had the curators been a bit less interested in agricultural economics and poor relief, and a bit more interested in art, they might have helped to clarify such thoughts. As it was, I was left with something approaching a sense of failure as I stood before paintings like Sunset: Carthorses Drinking at a Stream (c. 1760) or The Watering Place (1777). I suspect that if we like these things less than our forefathers did, the loss is ours, not theirs.
But while I felt a sort of confused warmth for the 'landskips', as Gainsborough spelled it, the one category of paintings with no appeal for me were the ‘fancy pictures’. In Cottage Girl with Dog and Pitcher (1785) a pretty little girl in ragged clothes stands in a lovely landscape holding a puppy and an earthenware pitcher. The work obviously looks back to Murillo – whose paintings of children I’ve always loathed for some reason – and the treatment of the sky and trees is elegant enough. For me, the problem with these works is not so much the issue of ‘so what’ exactly – clearly something is going on there, it's just that I have absolutely no sympathy for it. And it's not simply a question of the many offspring of such things one sees on park railings in major tourist centres, either. It's more about art history. An urchin is being placed on the level of an aristocratic patron or, possibly, a figure from a religious painting, but the point can neither be to create a portrait of a real individual, nor to convey an historical, theological or simple narrative account. So a great deal of weight is placed on a subject which – for me, anyway – is incapable of bearing it. Could the curators help? Well, the catalogue first announces that this little girl was ‘perceived primarily as an aesthetic object rather than a flesh-and-blood individual,’ and then goes on to add that
Such an image, while eliciting sympathy, also reminded the public of its own capacity for carrying out good works, the existence of the poor being regarded as an enduring opportunity for philanthropy rather than a problem to be eradicated.
Some might wonder how both these two statements fit together – why on earth should anyone want to eradicate aesthetic objects anyway? -– but in any event, neither of these explanations worked for me. To understand how anyone could admire such a picture – could find anything fresh, attractive or wholesome in it – would have been a genuine education in the ways in which the late eighteenth century differed from my own, but illumination was not forthcoming. Well, since disliking art is often more memorable and interesting than the alternative, I was glad to have had the chance to see this picture at first hand.
But then this is, annoying labels and vapid catalogue notwithstanding, a marvellous exhibition. More than some painters, Gainsborough benefits from the opportunity to see many of his paintings together in a single place. There is nothing tiring or repetitive about his work. In yet another revealing comment, Reynolds evokes the memory of Gainsborough, a gregarious and likeable man, walking with his companions up St Martin’s Lane or down Pall Mall, in St James’s Park or along the Strand:
Among others he had a habit of continually remarking to those who happened to be about him, whatever peculiarity of countenance, whatever accidental combination of figures or happy effects of light and shadow, occurred in prospects, in the sky, in walking the streets, or in company.
And indeed, this is what he does in the works on show here. There’s a very lively sense of discovery in many of these paintings, as if Gainsborough not only never grew bored with the wonders of the world around him, but also never tired of pointing out such wonders through the medium of his own brush and pencil. He left a magnificent body of work, well represented in this exhibition. I suspect many people will leave Tate Britain feeling strangely exhilarated by what they have seen here. Thankfully, the memory of those rapid brushstrokes, thick scumbles and sudden insights persists long after the memory of the labels beside them has faded.
Gainsborough, sponsored by the British Land Company plc, is at Tate Britain until 19 January 2003.
Bunny Smedley, October 25, 2002 10:24 AM