A dazzling vision

There are a number of reports by his contemporaries of Thomas Gainsborough at work. They make you realise what a very strange painter he was. There was an element of theatricality in his working practice — the public would expect to be astonished when they glimpsed it — but, even so, it is difficult to imagine any artist producing anything using Gainsborough’s methods. He painted in semi-darkness, and an observer reported that sitters for portraits found that ‘neither they nor their pictures were scarcely discernible’.

The canvas, if large, was hung loosely, ‘secured by small cords’. James Hamilton describes it as ‘rigged perhaps like a small yacht, the canvas bellying with every move’. It was placed right next to the sitter, and some commentators later claimed that Gainsborough used brushes six feet long. When painting a landscape, he did not venture outside, but constructed a little model in his parlour. It shocks us, impressed by the moral imperative to paint nature en plein air, but Gainsborough

would place cork and coal for his foregrounds & make middle grounds of sand and clay, bushes of mosses & lichens, & set up distant woods of broccoli.

Out of this bizarre — even tawdry —practice, he produced some of the most poetic paintings imaginable. He responded rapturously to the idea of nature, not some observed truth. (It has been remarked that you can tell from Constable’s ski​es​ what the weather will be like in six hours’ time, whereas with Gainsborough it’s impossible to say whether he intends a sunset or
a sunrise.)

Like his contemporary Fragonard, he dissolves the world into a fantastic surface, subduing its people into a subjective place of feathery brushstrokes and trees like bath foam. Gainsborough has an important place in British art: from him springs a line of visionaries whose eyes were directed inwards, from Samuel Palmer to Edward Burne-Jones and beyond.