illlllMlllllllllIMIIIIIIIIIIilllllllllllllllMiniMIIIIIIII! !!!liillllllilli!!i!l!filllllllllllllilltllililillill!lllliiili ] i h hi ' 1 1! 1 ll!!!lliii!iH!!l!!iiil!;)|:ii!ii!i!;iil!!!]!iiiiliii:i!i! liMiiniuiiii TUMIHIMIlli, ■Sill : WHITLEY :iHiHiiitninntiiiuinniiiiiiMiiiiitiiiiiiiiiiiiiMitiiiiiitiiiiniiMiiniitiiiiiiiiiiitiMifiiiinMiniiiitiiiiiiiiiniiiiiitiii!iiii!Mi|ii T: i iinjiiiiit ; Tf . IIRKIIIT >L LIBRARY UNIVERSITY Of 1 CALIfORNiA^/ THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH, R.A. From the portrait by Zoffany in the National Gallery THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH BY WILLIAM T. WHITLEY WITH ILLUSTRATIONS NEW YORK: CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS LONDON: SMITH, ELDER, & CO. 1915 c/;^ a o 9/<^ :k'ii Printed by Spottiswoode, Bai-lantyne & Co. Ltd. London, Colchester and Eton, England A/7) TO L. R. FOR WHOSE INVALUABLE HELP I AM DEEPLY INDEBTED 1S8 PREFACE There is no painter of English birth more widely appre- ciated than Gainsborough, whose art touches every observer, great and simple, learned and unlearned. " As we look at his pictures," said Constable, " we find tears in our eyes and know not what brings them." A thread of romance runs through the whole of Gainsborough's career, from his marriage to a beautiful and well-dowered bride whose origin is shrouded in mystery, down to the pathetic termination of the long years of jealous rivalry with Reynolds. And romance and mystery are in- separably connected with his pictures — with the portraits of that Duchess of Devonshire, whom tradition has brought us to regard as typical of English beauty ; with that masterpiece at Edinburgh, the portrait of Mrs. Graham, hidden from sight for fifty years on account of one of the tenderest of love stories ; and with the famous Blue Boy, the secret of whose history still remains undiscovered. Gainsborough charms us all, and we are interested in everything that concerns him. The mere rumour of the finding of some long hidden or forgotten painting from his hand is sufficient to fill the papers with articles and paragraphs, and yet he has attracted less attention from modern biographers than any artist of his rank. He has not been neglected, for many ably written books on Gainsborough have been published in our generation, but in none of them has any serious attempt been made to throw new light upon his career. Most of his biographers seem to have assumed that little or nothing new could be discovered about him, and that the only viii TKOMAS GAINSBOROUGH thing to be done was to re-arrange the existing material to the best advantage. Hence the noticeable resemblance to one another of the modern books upon the great Suffolk painter, in which the already familiar anecdotes are retold with but slight alteration. The lack of research and the consequent absence of ne\v material are frankly admitted by one of the later biographers of Gainsborough, Lord Ronald Gower. " Although," he says, " some elaborately illustrated lives have appeared during the last few years, they contain little beyond the facts given by Fulcher. . . . His life of Gainsborough, although only a booklet which can be read through in a couple of hours, is the most complete account we possess of one of our greatest painters, and from it all the material of his later biographies has been gleaned." Lord Ronald's statement is substantially, but not entirely accurate, for Gainsborough's letters to William Jackson had not been found when Fulcher wrote his book in 1855, and these have been available to the modem biographers as well as a few other letters that have come to light in auction rooms, or have been unearthed by the labours of the Historical Commis- sion. However, apart from these letters and some odd notes, the recent books contain very little that is not to be found in Fulcher, and in Fulcher the gaps are very large indeed, for his research was on a limited scale, except in the neighbourhood of Gainsborough's birth- place. George Williams Fulcher, whose little book has been used so extensively by succeeding biographers, was a native of Sudbury in Suffolk, and therefore the fellow- townsman of Gainsborough. A bookseller and printer, he was a man of literary tastes and apparently of con- siderable reading, who, towards the close of his life devoted much of his leisure to collecting materials for a memoir of the great painter, of whom at that time there was no real biography in existence. Fulcher gathered together PREFACE ix such local tradition and gossip as he could trace after so long an interval, for he did not begin to write until more than a century after Gainsborough had left Sudbury. His book also contains some letters of great interest that are to be found nowhere else, but most of his material has been gleaned from easily accessible sources. Fulcher's chief authorities were Philip Thicknesse, sometime Lieu- tenant-Governor of Landguard Fort, Harwich, whose Sketch of the Life and Painting of Thomas Gainsborough, Esq. was published in 1788 ; Horace Walpole ; William Jackson of Exeter ; Allan Cunningham's life of the artist, published in 1829 ; Garrick's correspondence ; and the articles on Gainsborough printed in 1788 in the Gentleman's Magazine and the European Magazine. The present volume is in the main the fruit of long research in fields untouched by Fulcher, and in writing it no attempt has been made to add to the already considerable volume of literature that deals with Gains- borough's work from the critical standpoint. My efforts have not been directed towards criticism, but to the discovery of new facts about the career of Gainsborough, of which so little has been known hitherto that even the dates given to his pictures in the National Gallery catalogue are conjectural, with the exception of that assigned to The Baillie Family. From various sources I have been fortunate enough to gather a large amount of fresh information about Gainsborough, and the greater part of this book is composed of material that is not to be found in any preceding biography of the artist. Among the new information about Sudbury will be found Gainsborough's own statement of the reason that induced his father to send him to London to study art. The notes on the Ipswich period include many facts about the Gainsborough family unrecorded until now; some account of Gainsborough's friends and surroundings at Ipswich ; the identification of the site of his house X THOMAS CxAlNSBOROUGH and a brief description of the house itself ; and the dis- covery of the long disputed date of the departure for Bath. In the four chapters on Bath some light is thrown on Gainsborough's life in that city. The story is told of his quarrel with a minor poet, about a portrait, which nearly brought the disputants to a duel; and among many other things new information is given about Garrick's portrait at Stratford, the history of which has always been obscure. Reasons are given for doubting whether Gainsborough ever lived at No. 24, The Circus ; and the assertion of Thicknesse questioned, that he was the means of driving Gainsborough from Bath to settle in London. Of Gainsborough's life in London, the most brilliant and interesting portion of his career, Fulcher's account is of the scantiest, and of some years nothing is recorded. A few letters and scraps of gossip, the titles of the pictures exhibited between 1777 ^^^ '^7^3' and brief accounts of Gainsborough's quarrel with the Academy in 1784, and of his funeral in 1788, practi- cally cover Fulcher's information concerning this re- markable period. Fortunately most of my new material is connected with London, and it enables me to tell the story of Gains- borough's professional hfe with some fulness, especially in the later years. The courtesy of the Royal Academy in giving me the almost unprecedented privilege of ex- amining the Council minutes has resulted in the discovery of fresh evidence concerning the artist's relations and quarrels with the Forty ; but my principal sources of information about Gainsborough in London have been the notes written by the Reverend Henry Bate (the " Fighting Parson "), afterwards Sir Henry Bate-Dudley. Bate, one of the founders of the Morning Post, and later the proprietor of the Morning Herald, was the champion of Gainsborough through all the last ten or twelve years PREFACE xi of his life. His admiration for the painter amounted almost to worship, and in the Morning Herald he chronicled the progress of Gainsborough's pictures and supported him against the Academy and against every- one who dared to question his artistic supremacy. To Bate I owe most of the descriptions in these pages of Gainsborough's private exhibitions, held at Schomberg House from 1784 to 1788 ; and of the final exhibition and sale of pictures at the same place a year after his death. Many of the anecdotes that I give about Gains- borough and his friends originated with Bate, whose intimacy with the artist is not referred to by preceding biographers. Bate is mentioned by some of them, but only as a sitter for the portrait that is now in the collec- tion of Lady Burton. Nor is there a record in any biography of Gains- borough of the private exhibitions just mentioned, at which many of his finest pictures were shown, sometimes in various stages of completion. Bate's intimate (and possibly inspired) notes on the pictures shown in Gains- borough's studio have helped me to find the dates, hitherto unknown, of a number of canvases. Among these are the famous Mrs. Robinson in the Wallace Col- lection, and the Mrs. Siddons, The Market Cart, and the Wood Scene, Village of Cornard, at the National Gallery. The information about the last-named work, given in a letter from Gainsborough to Bate, is of exceptional in- terest, as it proves that the painting of this landscape, commenced when the artist was a schoolboy, was the first important step in his career. Other pictures of which the dates, and occasionally particulars concerning the painting, are now given for the first time, include The Mall, St. James's Park ; the Cottage Girl with Dog and Pitcher; the Wood Gatherers (in Lord Carnarvon's collection) ; the Cottage Children with the A ss ; the Beggar Boys ; and the Lavinia. Among the portraits whose dates I have found are those of xii THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH Mrs. Sheridan (Lord Rothschild's full-length), Lady Horatia Waldegrave, Lord Alexander Hamilton, Lord Archibald Hamilton, the Duke of Norfolk, Lady Sheffield, Mrs. Douglas, Lady Bate-Dudley, the Marsham Family, Mrs. Pujet, Lady Basset, Lady Mendip, and Sir Peter Burrell, afterwards Lord Gwydyr. Nothing has been said before of Gainsborough's adventure with the highwayman, or of the misunder- standing with the Academy in 1783 about Lady Horatia Waldegrave's portrait, an incident that paved the way for the final rupture of 1784. Full particulars of these affairs are given, as well as of the dispute about the hanging of the Three Eldest Princesses, which brought Gainsborough's connection with the Academy to a close. Some of the contemporary remarks on this dispute suggest that its origin was political and connected with the famous Westminster election of the period. One of the best known stories about Gainsborough, that of his defacement of a portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire (" Your Grace is too hard for me "), is contradicted on the authority of Bate. Some new information is given about other portraits of the Duchess by Gainsborough ; and in Chapter VHI is described for the first time the sensation caused by the exhibition at the Royal Academy of the portrait of the Hon. Mrs. Graham. Some curious particulars, until now unpublished, will be found in Chapter XVHI, of the sales held by the Gainsborough family in 1797 and 1799 for the pur- pose of disposing of the remaining works of the painter, and of his books and other personal property. On one of these occasions The Housemaid, now at the National Gallery, was sold for four guineas and a half. In the same chapter is included a sketch of the life of that shadowy personage, Gainsborough Dupont, Gainsborough's nephew and only assistant, of whose professional career little has been recorded before beyond the fact that he painted the Merchant Elder Brethren at Trinity House. PREFACE xiii Gainsborough's letters to William Jackson of Exeter, now in the possession of the Royal Academy, are given in the Appendix, which also contains, among other in- formation, a description by his contemporary, Ozias Humphry, RA., of Gainsborough's method of painting portraits in a subdued light, and some notes on his hitherto unidentified friend and correspondent, William Pearce. Most of the anecdotes in Chapter XIX are new in the sense that they are not to be found in any other book on the artist, and new also is the touching letter (p. 282) written by Gainsborough after the death of his friend Abel. His Majesty the King has graciously permitted me to reproduce Gainsborough's group of The Three Eldest Princesses and the portrait of J. C. Fischer ; and I have to acknowledge with many thanks the information, or permission to reproduce pictures, kindly given to me by the Royal Academy of Arts ; the Duke of Norfolk ; the Duke of Westminster ; the Earl of Rosebery ; the Earl of Dartmouth ; the Earl of Carnarvon ; the Earl of Leicester ; the late Lord Rothschild ; Loid D'Abernon of Esher ; the Countess Feodore Gleichen ; Sir Ralph Anstruther ; Sir Audley Neeld ; Sir William Richmond, R.A. ; Mr. Hugh F. Seymour ; Mrs. Ludwig Mond ; Mr. Adolph Hirsch ; Mr. G. D. Leslie, R.A. ; Messrs. Christie, Manson & Woods ; Messrs. T. Agnew & Sons ; Messrs. Knoedler & Co. ; Mr. Walter L. Spiers of Sir John Soane's Museum ; Mr. A. W. Soward, C.B., of the Estate Duty Office ; the Corporation of Stratford-on- Avon ; the Proprietors of the Bath Journal ; the Editor of the East Anglian Daily Times ; Mr. Frank Brown of Ipswich ; Mr. F. C. Gower of Ipswich ; Mr. T. Sturge Cotterell of Bath ; Mr. J. Eagleton, Clerk to the Haber- dashers' Company ; Mr. W. J. Gardner, Clerk to the Drapers' Company ; Sir Henry Tnieman Wood, Secretary of the Royal Society of Arts ; Mr. John Hunt, Town Clerk of Westminster ; Messrs. Charles Hoare & Co. (Gainsborough's bankers) ; Mr. Frederick D. Wardle, xiv THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH Town Clerk of Bath ; Mr. H. S. Liesching of Trinity House ; and by Messrs. Cassell & Co., who have allowed me to use the letter from Gainsborough quoted in Chapter VI, and printed originally in Richard Redgrave, R.A., a Memoir. W. T. W. September 191 3. CONTENTS CHAP. PACK I. EARLY DAYS AT SUDBURY AND IPSWICH I II. BATH, I760-I766 28 III. BATH, I767-I768 48 IV. BATH, I769-I77I 65 V. BATH, I772-I774 84 VI. LONDON, I774-I776 . 106 VII. THE REVEREND HENRY BATE 127 VIII. LONDON, I777-I779 . 141 IX. LONDON, I780-I781 . 161 X. LONDON, 1782 . 179 XI. LONDON, 1783 . 194 XII. LONDON, 1784 . 212 XIII. LONDON, 1785 • 234 XIV. LONDON, 1786 • 253 XV. LONDON, 1787 . 269 XVI. LONDON, 1788 . 296 XVII. THE SALE AT SCHOMBERG HOUSE . 319 XVIII. GAINSBOROUGH DUPONT . 335 XIX. NOTES AND ANECDOTES . 354 XX. THE BLUE BOY . 372 APPENDIX • 379 INDEX .... • 399 ILLUSTRATIONS Thomas Gainsborough Frontispiece By J. ZOFFANY, ■R.\.,fro>n the Portrait in the National Gallery. TO FACE PAGE Plan of part of Ipswich, showing Mr. Craighton's Garden 12 By J. Grove, 1761. Plan of the Parish of St. Mary Key, Ipswich, show- ing Gainsborough's house in Foundation Street MARKED with A WHITE CROSS 21 From Pennington's Map 0/1778. The Painter's Daughters, Margaret and Mary . , 27 From tlie fainting by GAINSBOROUGH in tlie Victoria and Albert Museum. General Honywood 44 By Gainsborough. David Garrick 67 By Gainsborough, /n;w the portrait at Stratford-on-Avon. Captain Wade 77 By Gainsborough. The Painter's Daughter Mary (Mrs. Fischer) . . 122 From an unfinislied portrait i5y GAINSBOROUGH in the collection of Mr. Adolph Hirsch. The Reverend Henry Bate (Sir Henry Bate Dudley) 131 Fro7n the portrait by GAINSBOROUGH in the National Gallery. The Hon. Mrs. Graham 146 From tlie portrait by GAINSBOROUGH in the National Gallery of Scotland, John Christian Fischer 163 From tlie portrait by GAINSBOROUGH in the Royal Collection. Mrs. Robinson ("Perdita") 181 From the portrait by Gainsborough in tlie Wallace Collection. xvii xviii THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH TO FACE PAGE Lady Horatia Waldegrave 205 From (he portrait tyGAlNSBOROVGH in tlie collection of Mr. Hugh F. Sey?nour. The Eldest Princesses 213 From the portrait group by GAINSBOROUGH in the Royal Collection. The Mall, St. James's Park 229 From the picture by GAINSBOROUGH in the collection of Sir Audlcy Neeld. Mrs. Siddons 236 Frotn the portrait by GAINSBOROUGH in the National Gallery. Mrs. Sheridan 265 From the portrait by GAINSBOROUGH in Lord Rothschiht s collection. The Market Cart 273 From the picture by GAINSBOROUGH in the National Gallery. The Woodman 285 From, the engraving by Simon after Gainsborough s picture. Wood Scene, Village of Cornard, Suffolk (Gains- borough's Forest) 298 From the picture by GAINSBOROUGH in the National Gallery. St. John in the Wilderness 328 By MuRiLLO, from the picture in the collection of Mrs. Ludwig Mond. Gainsborough Dupont 345 From the portrait by GAINSBOROUGH in the collection of Lord D' Abernon of Esher. The Boy at the Stile 365 From the painting by GAINSBOROUGH iti the collection of Sir Ralph Anstruther. The Blue Boy 372 From the painting by GAINSBOROUGH in the collection of the Duke of Westminster. Most of the Illustrations are from Photographs by Emery Walker, Ltd. THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH CHAPTER I EARLY DAYS AT SUDBURY AND IPSWICH The painter's birthplace — " Bom in a mill " — Sudbury and the Gains- boroughs — The last survivor — Gainsborough's boyhood — Com- mencement of the Cornard Wood picture — It induces his father to send him to London — He works for Gravelot — The St. Martin's Lane Academy — Gainsborough not the pupil of Hayraan — A self-taught artist — He returns to Sudbury — The story of Mr. Fonnereau and ;^30o — Gainsborough's marriage to Margaret Burr — An unsympathetic union — The bride's relations in Edinburgh, London, and Glasgow — Eighteenth-century Ipswich — Philip Thick- nesse — The "Tom Peartree " legend — The Ipswich Journal — Joshua Kirby and Andrew Baldrey — Gainsborough's house at Ipswich — Its situation identified — Opposite the Shire Hall — The house described — Sale of Gainsborough's furniture and pictures — He leaves Ipswich for Bath — His work at Ipswich, Sudbury, the quiet country town in Suffolk where Thomas Gainsborough was born, is on the upper reaches of the Stour, the river on whose banks nearer the sea another great painter, John Constable, spent his youth and found the material for some of his best pictures. The Stour more than half encircles Sudbury, and as it curves and turns through the green meadows that sur- round the town glimpses of the river can be obtained from many of the wide and airy lanes and streets in which Gainsborough played and wandered as a boy. About these lanes and streets, with their Jacobean and Georgian houses, something of the eighteenth century atmosphere Ungers, and although silks and other fabrics are made in Sudbury there is nothing about it that suggests the dingi- 2 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH ness of a manufacturing town. Everything seems bright and clean and smokeless, and even William Morris might have been satisfied with the external aspect of some of the older factories, such as those in the lane almost immedi- ately adjoining the house in which Gainsborough was born — or is supposed to have been born; for on this point there is no direct evidence, although there is no doubt that the house was tenanted by Gainsborough's father at the time of the birth of his famous son. W. H. Pyne, the artist and writer who in his youth met Gainsborough, declared that he used to say, " Old pimply- nosed Rembrandt and myself were both born in a mill." The house once occupied by Gainsborough's father is exter- nally a good example of the better kind built in East Anglia in the Georgian period, but it is said to be much older than it looks. It stands in what was once known as Sepulchre Street ; now called Gainsborough Street in honour of the most distinguished native of the town. In Sudbury the name of Gainsborough was well known for at least two hundred years. Gainsborough's grand- father was a burgess in the middle of the seventeenth century, and a hundred years later two or three branches of the family were engaged in business in the town. Some of them were prosperous, for the list of subscribers to the Suffolk Fund raised in 1745 to help the Government to oppose the Young Pretender includes the names of John Gainsborough, junior, and Elizabeth Gainsborough, of Sudbury. John gave twenty -five pounds to the fund and Elizabeth ten guineas. Several of the family were then engaged in the manufacture of woollen fabrics, among them John Gainsborough, the father of the painter, who died in 1748 ; and his cousin, who carried on a business of the same kind until his death, which took place in or about 1793. He was the last of the woollen- making Gainsboroughs, and with the death of his daughter Emily the family became extinct in Sudbury. Emily EARLY DAYS 3 Gainsborough, who died in 1852 at the age of sixty-six, was " a lady of amplefortune, which she spent in charity and benevolence." She lived in Sepulchre Street, not far from the supposed birthplace of Gainsborough, and her memory was long cherished in the town. An interesting point about Emily Gainsborough was that her features strongly resembled those of the great painter to whom she was related. She died suddenly, as Thomas her brother had done several years earlier ; and as Ann Gains- borough, her cousin, and the last of the painter's nieces who bore his name, died in 1840. The exact date of Gainsborough's birth is uncertain, but he was baptized in May 1727, at the Independent Meeting House in Friars Street. A large Congregational chapel has now taken the place of the original meeting- house, the records of which, dating back for more than two hundred years, have fortunately been preserved. They show an intimate connection between members of the Gainsborough family, most of whom were Dissenters, and the chapel in Friars Street. Some of the charitable funds of the chapel are due to the bequests of a certain Thomas Gainsborough, who was apparently a cousin of the painter. He must have had something of his relative's sociable and generous nature, for, when leaving consider- able sums for the support of the schools and the minister, he was not unmindful of the comfort of the trustees by whom they were to be administered. Thomas Gains- borough left twenty shillings a year for the refreshment of the trustees at their annual meetings, and among the papers at the chapel is an old bill showing how the money was expended in 1752. This is the entry : " Feb. iith. — Spent the 20s. left by Mr. Thomas Gains- borough as follows : £ s. d. £ s. d. Dinner . .080 Punch. .024 Wine . .030 Beer & Ale .028 Coffee . .030 Servant .010" 4 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH John Gainsborough, the father of the painter, was at one time a man of substance, but his liberal disposition, added to the expense of bringing up a large family, gradu- ally reduced his prosperity. His business of clothier or cloth merchant declined, and at the time of his death in 1748, he held the position of postmaster at Sudbury. He had five sons and four daughters. Of the sons the eldest, known as " Scheming Jack," was the inventor of many ingenious but apparently useless machines and instruments ; the second, Humphry, was a Dissenting minister ; and the youngest, Thomas, the painter, is the subject of this book. Little is known of the two remain- ing brothers, Mathias and Robert. The daughters, Mary, Sarah, Elizabeth, and Susannah, all found husbands. The eldest and the youngest, Mrs. Gibbon and Mrs. Gardiner, settled at Bath ; but Sarah (Mrs. Dupont) and EHzabeth (Mrs. Bird), married and spent their lives in Sudbury. John Gainsborough's wife is said to have been a woman of cultivation, and an amateur painter. Her brother, the Rev, Humphry Burroughs, was the master of Sudbury Grammar School, and numbered his nephew Thomas among his pupils. Of Thomas Gainsborough's boyhood, passed in the town of his birth, the record, slight as it is, appears to be chiefly legendary. The only positive piece of informa- tion concerning it is the letter already mentioned in the Preface, and written to Bate by Gainsborough in 1788, the year of his death. In that letter, which is to be found in Chapter XVI, Gainsborough says that his father sent him to London in consequence of the promise displayed in the landscape. Wood Scene, Village of Cornard, which he commenced before he left school. Nor are we well informed about the young painter's Ufe in London in the years that preceded his marriage, for the definite statements made by some writers about his tuition and his progress in the metropolis are more or less speculative. Fulcher says that Gainsborough lived EARLY DAYS 5 in London at the house of a silversmith, and probably this is right, for the original authority for the statement (though Fulcher did not know it) was the Reverend Henry Bate, whom I have mentioned in the Preface as the source of the larger part of the fresh information in this book relative to Gainsborough's later years in London. The silversmith may be the person referred to in an unpub- Hshed letter by Mrs. Lane, Gainsborough's niece. Speak- ing of her uncle's boyhood at Sudbury, she says, " An intimate friend of his mother's, being on a visit, was so struck by the merit of several heads he had taken, that he prevailed on his father to allow him to return with him to London, promising that he should remain with him and that he would procure him the best instruction he could obtain." We know now from Gainsborough's letter that it was a landscape and not portraits that induced the boy's father to send his son to London at the age of thirteen, but otherwise there is no reason to doubt the accuracy of the story told by Mrs. Lane, who lived on intimate terms with her uncle and his family, and was the mother of Richard Lane, A.R.A., and of the famous Arabic scholar, Edward William Lane. Mr. A. B. Chamberlain, in his life of Gainsborough, suggests that the silversmith was one of the Duponts who practised the craft in London in the first half of the eighteenth century, and as Gains- borough's sister married a Dupont of Sudbury the sug- gestion is not without interest. But there are no reasons for crediting the assertion, made positively by another writer, that Gainsborough himself began life in London as a goldsmith or silversmith. Gainsborough's silversmith, according to Bate, was a man of taste, and a good friend to the young artist, as he often admitted in after years. Bate says that soon after his arrival in the metropolis Gainsborough made the acquaintance of Hubert Gravelot, a French artist, then residing in London, who introduced him to the 6 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH drawing school at the Academy of Arts in St. Martin's Lane. That he had some connection with the French- man seems clear, for on this point Bate is supported by the author of the obituary published in the Morning Chronicle on the day of Gainsborough's funeral, who says, " He soon after became a pupil of Mr. Gravelot, under whose instructions he drew most of the ornaments which decorate the illustrious heads, so admirably engraved by Houbraken." The heads were engraved for Birch's Lives of Illustrious Persons in Great Britain, and these volumes, as I shall show later, were among the very few books in Gainsborough's possession at the time of his death. Charles Grignion, the engraver, who was contemporary with Gainsberough, also says that he received some rudi- mentary instruction from Gravelot, with whom, however, he seems to have worked rather as an assistant than as a pupil. Gravelot may have introduced Gainsborough to the Drawing Academy in St. Martin's Lane, but there is reason to believe that he cannot have worked there very much. More than ninety years ago W. H. Pyne, the writer already mentioned, compiled a list of the pain- ters, sculptors, and engravers who had studied at the St. Martin's Lane Academy. He was assisted by " the last surviving member of this old English school of wor- thies — the pupil of Frank Hayman — John Taylor, who knew them all, and whose never-failing reminiscences have helped us, and that mainly too, in drawing up this list." The list contains the names of a large number of artists, some well known and some forgotten, but that of Gainsborough does not appear in it. It seems impossi- ble that the name of an artist so distinguished could have been omitted accidentally either by Taylor, who knew Gainsborough well, and has handed down to us an in- teresting note on The Blue Boy ; or by Pyne, who was a devout admirer of the great Suffolk painter, and an in- EARLY DAYS 7 satiable collector of gossip concerning him. The omis- sion is more remarkable because in the Hst the names are grouped together of all Hayman's pupils who had worked at St. Martin's Lane, including those of Dance and of John Taylor himself. And Hayman, it should be remem- bered, has been described as Gainsborough's master by all the biographers since Allan Cunningham. A great deal has been written about the supposed in- fluence of Hayman upon Gainsborough's painting and upon his moral character, and Fulcher has asserted that " whatever was questionable in Gainsborough's after con- duct must in a great measure be attributed to his early removal from home influence, and to Hayman's example." Hayman certainly appears to have been a person of con- vivial and somewhat rowdy habits, and therefore not the man with whom to place a boy of thirteen, but the evi- dence that Hayman taught Gainsborough, or that he had anything to do \\ith him, is extremely slight. It appears to be limited to a note in the Aitecdotes of Painting, pub- lished twenty years after Gainsborough's death, by Edward Edwards, A.R.A., who says : " He was sent to London and placed under the tuition of Mr. Hayman, with whom, however, he stayed but a very short time." There is no mention of Hayman in the earlier biographical sketches by Philip Thicknesse, Henry Bate, Anthony Pasquin, and the anonymous author of the article in the Morning Chronicle, all of whom were personally ac- quainted with Gainsborough ; and as I have shown, nothing is said of a connection between Gainsborough and Hayman by Taylor, who was himself Hayman's pupil. Gainsborough, I believe, owed little either to masters or to academies of drawing, and that Reynolds was of this opinion is evident from his Fourteenth Discourse. In that he cites Gainsborough as an example of an artist who has arrived at great fame " without the assistance of an academical education, or any of those preparatory studies which have been so often recommended," and 8 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH adds that his handling had the appearance of the work of a painter who had never learned from others the usual and regular practice belonging to the art. In some of the notes made in preparing this address on Gains- borough, printed in Cotton's book, Sir Joshua writes : " It was said of him that he was self-educated. ... In this self-instruction there is undoubtedly an animation in the pursuit, and self-gratulation in the success, that is flattering. But if Gainsborough had had the good for- tune, which the present students have, of being taught in an Academy, we should not now regret what was per- haps his greatest deficiency, a want of precision in the form of his objects." Gainsborough in his lifetime was frequently spoken of as a self-taught artist. " Nature was his master, for he had no other," wrote Thicknesse in 1770 ; and the writer in the Morning Chronicle, though he says Gainsborough went as a pupil to Gravelot, heads his article, " By Heaven, and not a master, taught." The same writer says that he " made his first essays in art by modelling figures of cows, horses, and dogs, in which he attained very great excellence. There is a cast in the plaister shops of an old horse that he modelled which has peculiar merit." But with whomsoever Gains- borough lived or studied he seems, young as he was, to have been able to look after himself from the first day that he arrived in London. Bate declares that hence- forth he did not cost his family a penny. He remained in London for several years, and supported himself by modelling, working for Gravelot, and painting small por- traits and landscapes. It was probably in the year 1745 that he returned to Suffolk, to try his fortune as a painter in the town of his birth. There, according to a story told by William Windham (Pitt's Secretary for War), his earhest sup- porter was Mr. Fonnereau, a member of the family which long owned the beautiful old house in Christchurch Park, Ipswich, where the effigy of Tom Peartree is now to be EARLY DAYS 9 seen. Windham, who did not like Gainsborough, and described him as dissolute and capricious and not very delicate in his sentiments of honour, says that Mr. Fon- nereau gave him his first chance by lending him £300, and that the painter was afterwards so forgetful of this benefit as to vote against his patron's interest in a par- liamentary election. " His conscience, however, remon- strating against such conduct, he kept himself in a state of intoxication from the time he set out to vote till his return to town, that he might not relent of his ingrati- tude." The only thing that gives the slightest colour to this remarkable story is that one of the Fonnereaus was for a time the parliamentary representative of Sudbury. Although at times he was glad to sell sketches for very small sums, it is unlikely that Gainsborough needed financial aid to give him a start in life. Even as a boy he possessed a money-making faculty, and he was only nineteen when he married a wealthy bride — wealthy, that is to say, for a youth of his standing and upbringing. His bride was Margaret Burr, a beautiful girl, of whose origin contradictory versions are given. Margaret Burr has been described by various authorities as " a prince's daughter," as an unacknowledged daughter of one of the Dukes of Bedford, and as the sister of a commercial traveller in the employ of Gainsborough's father. She was endowed not only with beauty but with an annuity of two hundred a year ; equal to four or five hundred a year at the present value of money. The source of this income is conjectural, but I am able to give in another chapter some information as to the channel through which it reached the Gainsboroughs. Mrs. Gainsborough's antecedents, though certainly mysterious, were perhaps less romantic than some writers have supposed, for I have discovered that she had relations living in London and in Scotland in 1794. A niece, Mary Burr, was at that time residing in Panton Street, Haymarket ; and a nephew, James Burr, at 10 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH Bell's Mills, Edinburgh. There may be people living even to-day who could throw some light upon Mrs. Gains- borough's origin and connections. Mr. Alexander Fraser, writing thirty-five years ago in The Portfolio, stated that relatives of hers were at that time resident in Glasgow. " They have," he said, " or had until lately, a most deli- cately touched small cabinet portrait of Mrs. Gains- borough by her husband, the tradition in the family being that he annually for many years painted her por- trait on the anniversary of her marriage day." A marriage in which bride and bridegroom were both in their teens could be nothing but a lottery, and Gains- borough, who was perhaps not an easy man to live with, did not find the ideal wife in the beautiful Margaret Burr. Her character and conduct, as far as our infor- mation goes, were beyond reproach, but she appears to have been unreasonably economical, and to have looked too sharply after the expenditure of her husband, a man who was naturally generous and hospitable. The evi- dence of PhiHp Thicknesse on this point may not be unprejudiced as he was on bad terms with Mrs. Gains- borough ; but it is supported by that of Henry Angelo, who knew the painter intimately. " Gainsborough," says Angelo, " afraid of his wife and consequently ill at ease at home, was not entirely comfortable abroad lest his Xantippe should discover what he expended on his rambles. It is true he was no economist of his cash, but the parsimony of his lady was beyond the endurance of any man possessing the least spirit of liberality, and Gainsborough was liberal to excess. Fischer, who, on the contrary, was anything rather than an uxorious spouse, used to banter his father-in-law upon this submission." In spite of Allan Cunningham's picture of evenings of domestic felicity, and Fulcher's pretty story of the tender messages conveyed by the agency of the pet dogs, Tristram and Fox, it is evident that little sympathy ex- isted between Gainsborough and his wife. A sufficient EARLY DAYS ii proof of this is to be found in the letter sent by the painter to his sister Mrs. Gibbon, at Bath, in December 1775. " What would it all signify," he wrote sadly, " if 1 tell you my wife is weak but good, and never much formed to humour my happiness; what can you do to alter her ? " Ipswich, in the middle of the eighteenth century, bore Uttle resemblance to the busy, thriving town of to-day, with its great engineering works and prosperous indus- tries of many other kinds. Its population at the time of the first census of 1801 was only eleven thousand, and was probably smaller when Gainsborough was living there. A contemporary writer describes the town as old and ill-built, with unlighted streets ; and only en- livened by the occasional visits of travelling theatrical companies. But Ipswich, if dull, was picturesque, not only in its rustic suburbs and its riverside neighbourhood but in itself. To-day it is a curious mixture of old and new, factories and warehouses jostling and overshadow- ing the ancient buildings that are yet to be found in most of its numerous parishes. There are houses with overhanging eaves and carved corner-posts in Gains- borough's own parish of St. Mary Quay (or Key, as it was spelt in his time) that must already have been vene- rable when the boy artist brought his young wife to the town more than a hundred and sixty years ago ; and in the central parts of Ipswich still finer relics may be found of the domestic architecture of bygone days. Of these the best is the magnificent " Sparrowe's House," in the Butter Market. One of the Sparrowes, a man who was thirteen times Baihff of Ipswich, was painted by Gainsborough, and seventy or eighty years after he had left the town the portrait was still hanging in the house. It was at Ipswich that Gainsborough made the ac- quaintance of Philip Thicknesse, to whose memoir of the painter we owe many stories which, whether true or false, have been embodied in all his biographies. Thicknesse, 12 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH a man of some parts, and at this time of some means, was the brother of that George Thicknesse, one time Master of St. Paul's School, whom Sir Philip Francis, his former pupil, described as " the quietest, learnedst, wisest and best of men." Philip Thicknesse, who had seen military service abroad, obtained in 1753 the appoint- ment of Lieutenant-Governor of Landguard Fort, built for the protection of Harwich, and apparently met Gains- borough soon afterwards, as he speaks in the memoir of 1788 of having had " an intimate acquaintance and most affectionate regard for him for upwards of thirty-five years." Gainsborough's artistic biography may almost be said to commence on the day when the newly ap- pointed Lieutenant-Governor, walking in " a pretty town garden " belonging to Craighton, the printer and editor of the Ipswich Journal, saw, and was deceived by the effigy now known as "Tom Peartree." Thicknesse mis- took for a real man's head and shoulders the painted board which the mischievous Gainsborough had fixed upon the garden wall, and was so surprised at the deception that he took the trouble to seek the artist at his house. He was received in a room full of landscapes and of portraits, one of which was that of Admiral Vernon, now in the National Portrait Gallery ; and by his own showing he became from that time forth the patron and encourager of the most remarkable natural genius in painting pro- duced by the English school. Thicknesse claims to have been the original discoverer of Gainsborough's talent, and the cause of his removal from Ipswich to Bath, and subsequently from Bath to London. By a fortunate chance, when turning over some old plans of Ipswich at the British Museum, I came across a small engraving which shows the situation, and to some extent the arrangement, of Craighton's garden in which Gainsborough placed the painted board that imposed upon Thicknesse. The plate, dated 1761, is dedicated to Charles Townshend, then Secretary for War ; but it was . ff h ■,/■,//>/<■',■ 1.1 r ' ■ ^ (iart/en >9 9y»?y9y