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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<y^?
To theHi^tHon"' i
( 7uu rrJ <5^//////. i/f/'/idci/j, .'
JSecreitaiy atWar,^ |
t y. urazf~C-p .
L
PLAN OF PART OF IPSWICH IN 1761, SHOWING
MR. CRAIGHTON'S GARDEN
EARLY DAYS 13
evidently engraved for some special purpose of Craigh-
ton's own. In the borders are pictures of several of the
Ipswich churches, and in the centre a plan of a small
portion of the town round about St. Nicholas Street and
the market-place, with " Mr. Craighton's Printing Office "
and "Mr. Craighton's Garden" prominently displayed
and labelled. It shows that the office where the Ipswich
Journal was then printed stood on the west side of Queen
Street, at the comer of the Butter Market. The garden
did not adjoin Craighton's office, but was a little to the
south-east, towards Friars Street, and was approached by
a short alley or private road from Queen Street. There
was no Princes Street in those days, and the offices of
Messrs. Ransomes, Sims & Jefferies must, I think,
stand on part of the "pretty town garden" in which
Gainsborough placed his painting of Tom Peartree.
This curious work of art has now found a permanent
home at Ipswich, in Christchurch Mansion, the fine old
Tudor house that was presented to the town some years
ago by Mr. Felix Cobbold. It represents the head and
shoulders of a man with folded arms, painted, and cut
out of a board. The man wears a hat which throws the
upper part of his face into deep shadow, and shown
as it is at Ipswich, with the elbows of the effigy resting
on a low wall, it is easy to understand how Thicknesse
and others may have been deceived when they saw it at
a distance. As a painting it is commonplace, and Allan
Cunningham must have been misinformed when he de-
scribed it as a work much admired among artists. Its
pedigree is given on a label hanging beside it at Christ-
church Mansion. From Craighton, in whose garden
Thicknesse saw it, the figure passed to Stephen Jackson,
grandfather of the late proprietor of the Ipswich Journal,
and it was still in the possession of the Jackson family
when it was shown at the Gainsborough exhibition at the
Grosvenor Gallery in 1885. Some years later it was ac-
quired by Messrs. Leggatt, the picture dealers, and by
14 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
them sold to Mr. W. H. Booth, who presented it to the
town of Ipswich.
Most of Gainsborough's biographers connect this figure
of "Tom Peartree " with the oft-told story of the boy
artist sketching the portrait of the rustic who was plot-
ting an attack on a pear tree in the elder Gainsborough's
orchard at Sudbury. It is even said that the stump of
the tree can still be seen at Sudbury, but in so far as it
relates to that town I believe this story to be purely
mythical, Cunningham, writing in 1829, appears to have
been the first to couple "Tom Peartree " with the Sud-
bury orchard. With characteristic picturesqueness Cun-
ningham describes young Gainsborough as concealed
among some bushes, in the act of drawing an old tree,
" when he observed a man looking most wistfully over
the wall at some pears, which were hanging ripe and
tempting. The slanting light of the sun happened to
throw the eager face into a highly picturesque mixture
of light and shade, and the boy immediately sketched his
likeness, much to the poor man's consternation after-
wards, and to the amusement of Gainsborough's father,
when he taxed the peasant with the intention of plun-
dering his garden, and showed him how he looked. Gains-
borough long afterwards made a finished painting of this
Sudbury rustic, under the name of Tom Peartree's por-
trait." Fulcher, in his life of the artist pubHshed twenty-
seven years later, adopts Cunningham's statement that
"Tom Peartree " was painted from the Sudbury sketch,
and further embroiders the story with a summer-house
in the orchard, in which the boy Gainsborough was
hidden ; describes the very features of the man, " in
which roguery and indolence, hope and fear, were happily
blended," and makes him not merely covet the pears,
but steal them.
Neither Cunningham nor Fulcher appears to have
known where the story originated that connects with
Gainsborough's boyhood the episode of the man and the
EARLY DAYS 15
orchard. It is to be found in the obituary article on
Gainsborough already mentioned, which was pubHshed
in the Morning Chronicle three or four days after his
death. There it lacks the detail of the later versions,
but the motive of the story is identical — with one im-
portant exception. The orchard was not that of Gains-
borough's father. It is not even said that it was at
Sudbury, but only "in the neighbourhood," at some
place where young Gainsborough was staying with a
clergyman named Coyte. It was Coyte's orchard the
man was proposing to rob when the boy artist saw him.
The real story of the painted efhgy now at Ipswich is
told by Thicknesse in a passage that has been most
unaccountably overlooked by all subsequent biographers
of Gainsborough. Thicknesse, it wall be remembered,
made the acquaintance of Gainsborough through seeing
the " Tom Peartree " figure, the name of which we know
only through his memoir of the painter. He describes
early in his book the scene of the deception in the garden,
and on a later page apologises for having left unexplained
the origin of the painted man. "This," says Thicknesse,
" Mr. Gainsborough related when I first visited him. At
the bottom of his Ipswich garden grew a fine bergamot
pear tree, and while Mr. Gainsborough had his palette
and brushes in his hand Thomas was looking over the
wall and contemplating how he could come at some of
the windfalls. The sun shone just upon the top of
Thomas's nose and chin while all the rest of his dejected
countenance appeared in shadow under his broad-brimmed
hat, which so struck Mr. Gainsborough's fancy (for such
are the happy moments for poets and painters) that he
snatched up his window shutter and got Thomas into his
painting-room before he had even tasted of the for-
bidden fruit."
It is, I think, evident that Sudbury can claim no share
in the Tom Peartree incident, and it is probable that the
legend of Gainsborough sketching the man in his father's
i6 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
orchard owes its origin altogether to the story as told
by Philip Thicknesse. The introduction of the name of
Coyte into the affair was perhaps due to the fact that the
large botanical garden of Dr. Coyte, at Ipswich, was
close to, if it did not actually adjoin, the pleasure ground
belonging to Mr. Craighton of the Ipswich Journal, where
Gainsborough set the painted figure on the wall. Coyte's
Gardens, a narrow, old-fashioned alley leading out of
Friars Street, still marks at Ipswich the locality of the
former domain of the botanist.
To the Ipswich Journal, while edited by Craighton, I
am indebted for some new information concerning Gains-
borough and his Suffolk friends and associates. Unfor-
tunately the Ipswich Journal, in common with most
country newspapers of the eighteenth century, did not
give much space to local news. Its information was
copied almost entirely from the London press, and some-
times it contained no Ipswich intelligence beyond the
number of births and deaths recorded in the week pre-
ceding publication. Such country news as the paper
gives consists in great part of reports of murders, rob-
beries with violence, and conflicts between smugglers
and excisemen. There are frequent references to high-
waymen, who seem to have exercised a reign of terror
over the entire country, and at whose hands both Gains-
borough and his nephew Dupont were destined to suffer
in after years.
The portion of the Ipswich Journal which best re-
flects the life of the ancient Suffolk town is the space
devoted to advertisements, and it is here alone that any
reference to the artist and his friends can be found.
That the town was not unmindful of the graphic arts in
Gainsborough's days is shown by the announcements of
occasional sales of paintings by eminent masters ; and
of engravings, advertised by London dealers through
local agents. Sometimes there are records of visits made
to the town by travelling artists, such as Mr. Ferguson,
EARLY DAYS 17
limner in China ink, who offers to draw a portrait on
vellum and supply it with frame and glass complete for
fifteen shillings. The advertisement of a travelling ex-
hibition of " fine paintings, done by the celebrated
Raphael," and held at the King's Head, indicates in its
concluding paragraph that the pictures of the Italian
master needed some extraneous attraction to draw the
Ipswich crowd to the show: " N.B. — A sober and honest
Man that blows a French Horn or Trumpet may have
good encouragement." " Florist's Feasts " and other
flower shows, particularly of auriculas, were frequent in
their season, and music was patronised extensively.
Gainsborough must have found great pleasure in the
numerous concerts, at one of which, as we know by his
letters, he met the viohnist Giardini. In 1758, the year
before the painter left for Bath, a series of twenty-
six concerts was given at Ipswich at fortnightly
intervals, and several of the concerts were followed by
balls.
So far as I have been able to discover there is nothing
about Gainsborough in the editorial columns of the
papers published during his residence in Ipswich, but this
is not surprising, as he was a comparatively obscure per-
sonage of no local importance. Of the advertisements
only two concern him directly, but both are of great in-
terest, as will be seen later. There are many advertise-
ments from Joshua Kirby, his friend of friends, and the
future President of the Society of Artists of Great Britain,
by whose side Gainsborough, at his own request, was
buried in the churchyard at Kew. Except for his in-
terest in painting, Kirby, with whom he formed so close
an intimacy, does not appear to have had many sym-
pathies with the gay and pleasure-loving Gainsborough.
The father of the irreproachable Mrs. Trimmer, of edu-
cational and Sunday-school renown (whose books Queen
Charlotte lent sometimes to Fanny Burney), Kirby was
a man of uncommon piety. "So high was his reputa-
B
i8 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
tion for knowledge and divinity, and so exemplary his
moral conduct, that as an exception to the general rule,
which admitted no laymen, he was chosen member of a
clerical club in the town in which he resided." The bio-
grapher of another member of the same family, William
Kirby, the entomologist, denies that Joshua Kirby was
a coach and house-painter, but the advertisements in the
Ipswich Jottrnal prove conclusively that he did follow those
honest but unaristocratic occupations, and it is to his credit
that he was not ashamed of them. James Gandon, who was
the contemporary of Kirby, says that he was the appren-
tice of a widow who carried on a house and sign-painter's
business at Ipswich, and that it was Hogarth who en-
couraged him to practise the fine arts after seeing a rose
that he had executed for a sign. Gainsborough may
have assisted Kirby at times in his house-painting busi-
ness, for Thicknesse says that the young artist came
back to Suffolk after his few years of London training
hoping to pick up a decent livelihood " by turning his
hand to every kind of painting."
Joshua !virby appears as an advertiser in the Ipswich
Journal as early as 1745, when he offers for sale " A
Curious Print of Mr. Garrick, from an original Painting
by Mr. Pond, engrav'd by Mr. Wood," at a shilhng a
copy. He is anxious soon afterwards to dispose of " A
Genteel Chariot " ; and in 175 1, as agent for Mr. Hogarth
at the Golden Head in Leicester Fields, he advertises for
sale, at eighteenpence each the large prints of Beer Street
and Gin Lane. Kirby had many dealings with Hogarth,
and a letter written by him from Ipswich to the com-
bative little artist of Leicester Fields can be seen at the
British Museum. Hogarth designed for Kirby the fron-
tispiece of the edition of Brook Taylor's Perspective made
Easy, for which subscriptions were invited in 175 1.
Kirby, in 1755, advertises in the Ipswich paper the second
edition of this work, and states at the same time that
" the Author continues to carry on the Painting Busi-
EARLY DAYS 19
ness as usual, and all orders shall be obeyed with the
greatest punctuality."
In August 1755 there appears upon the scene Mr.
Andrew Baldrey, a friend of Gainsborough's, whose name
until now has only been known in connection with the
notice of his death in 1802. He was then described as
a man of considerable merit as a painter, but diffident
of his own abilities, and " long an intimate acquaint-
ance of the late Mr. Gainsborough." Andrew Baldrey,
whose identity had been a puzzle to me, and probably
to many others interested in Gainsborough's history,
now proves to have been Joshua Kirby's chief assistant
in the house and coach-painting business, who this year
was taken into partnership with his principal. The
event is thus announced in 1755 :
" The Painting Business in which Joshua Kirby hath
been engaged for several years past is now carried on in
partnership with him and his late servant, Andrew Baldrey,
and those gentlemen who shall be pleased to continue
their favours may depend upon having their business
done in each branch of painting in the best manner and
upon the most reasonable terms. J. Kirby humbly hopes
that those gentlemen who have not been personally ap-
plied to on this occasion will be so good as to excuse it."
Fulcher says that Kirby left Ipswich for London in
1753, but this announcement shows that he did not admit
a partner to his business until 1755 ; and he did not
entirely sever his connection with Ipswich until the
end of September 1759, about three weeks before Gains-
borough's departure for Bath. Kirby's son, a youth of
promise as a painter, was the pupil of Gainsborough,
whom he is said to have disliked as a master. Young
Kirby was studying at Ipswich in August 1759, and in
the following month his father came down from London,
and, resigning all further interest in the house-painting
business, transferred his share of it to Andrew Baldrey,
who carried it on until his death. The name of Baldrey
20 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
was borne by several painters and engravers who worked
in the eastern counties in the later years of the eighteenth
century ; and Joshua Kirby Baldrey, who sometimes
exhibited pictures at the Royal Academy, was the son
of Gainsborough's Ipswich friend.
Two letters written by Gainsborough while at Ipswich
indicate that portrait commissions in Suffolk were plen-
tiful enough, even if the prices were not high. The first
letter shows, too, that Gainsborough was already par-
ticular about the placing of his pictures in the exact
light for which they were painted. He says, writing to
a correspondent in the neighbouring town of Colchester,
on February 24, 1757 :
" I am favoured with your obliging letter, and shall
finish your picture in two or three days at farthest, and
send to Colchester according to your order, with a frame.
I thank you. Sir, for your kind intention of procuring
me a few heads to paint when I come over, which I pur-
pose doing as soon as some of those are finished which I
have in hand. I should be glad if you'd place your
picture as far from the light as possible ; observing to
let the hght fall from the left."
Apparently Gainsborough was prevented from paying
a visit to Colchester by pressure of portrait work at home,
as in March 1758 he writes to the same correspondent
to apologise for not visiting him as he had promised.
" But business comes in, and being chiefly in the Face
way I'm afraid to put people off when they are in the
mind to sit." He goes on to speak of the portrait sent
to Colchester in the preceding year, and excuses its sup-
posed coarseness of texture :
" You please me much by saying that no other fault
is to be found in your picture than the roughness of the
surface ; for that part being of use in giving force to the
effect at a proper distance, and what a judge of painting
knows an original from a copy by ; in short being the
touch of the pencil which is harder to preserve than
smoothness, I urn much better pleased that they should
rjy T'w^"¥y
THE PARISH OF ST. MARY KEY, IPSWICH, 1778
Gainsborough's House in Foundation Street is marked wth a white cross
EARLY DAYS 21
spy out things of that kind than to see an eye half an
inch out of its place or a nose out of drawing when view'd
at a proper distance. I don't think it would be more
ridiculous for a person to put his nose close to the canvas
and say the colours smell offensive than to say how rough
the paint lies ; for one is just as material as the other
with regard to hurting the effect and drawing of a pic-
ture. For Sir Godfrey Kneller used to tell them that
pictures were not made to smell of. . . ."
The second letter was written only eighteen months
before Gainsborough's departure for Bath, but he seems
from the first to have found commissions at Ipswich and
in the neighbouring districts, as we know that some por-
traits, " perfectly like but stiffly painted," were seen by
Thicknesse in his studio in 1753. He may have found
patrons among the visitors to Harwich, a seaport to which
in the season well-to-do Londoners were thronging at
this time. " The new salt water baths at Harwich,"
wrote Walpole in 1755, " grows the most fashionable
resource for people who want to get out of town."
According to Fulcher, Gainsborough's house at Ipswich
was in Brook Street, and No. 41 Lower Brook Street, a
small red-brick house not far from the Quay, is now shown
as his former residence. However, it is curious that a
carefully compiled guide-book of about fifty years ago
mentions as already demolished the house in Lower Brook
Street that local tradition assigned to Gainsborough.
In describing the principal objects in the town the writer
of the guide-book says : " We need not take Lower
Brook Street on our way, for little can be said of it,
except that here stood the house that Gainsborough is
said to have inhabited." Fulcher, who did not write
his book until nearly a century after the painter had left
Ipswich for Bath, gives no authority for his assertion
about the house in Brook Street. It would be unsafe to
say that Gainsborough never lived there, but I have
indisputable proof that he was not living in Lower Brook
Street at the close of his sojourn in Ipswich. The Ipswich
22 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
Journal of October 20, 1759, contains the following ad-
vertisement, which is valuable as showing the long dis-
puted date of Gainsborough's departure from the town :
"To be Sold, Opposite the Shire Hall, Ipswich. On
Mondav and Tuesday next, the 22nd and 23rd inst.
All the Household Goods of Mr. Thomas Gains-
borough, with some Pictures and original Dr-\wings
in the Landskip way by his own hand, which, as he is
desirous of leaving them among his friends, will have the
lowest prices set upon them. The house to be let im-
mediately. Enquire of Mrs. EUzabeth Rasse, in Ipswich."
It must have been this sale that Fulcher's correspond-
ent, Mr. Strutt, had in his mind when he wrote the often-
quoted letter describing how Gainsborough's sketch of
the members of the Ipswich musical club came into the
possession of his family. " When Gainsborough was
leaving Ipswich," wrote Mr. Strutt to Fulcher, " his
friends paid a last visit to his studio and expressed a wish
to have some memorial of his pencil. The good-natured
artist complied. One took one sketch, one another ;
and finally that I have been describing came into my
father's hands." Evidently Gainsborough did not give the
pictures to his friends but sold them at nominal prices.
The Shire Hall at Ipswich was a seventeenth-century
building of red brick and white stone that stood in the
centre of an open space adjoining Foundation Street,
and known as Shire Hall 'ard. It was used for various
municipal and county purposes until it was pulled down
to make room for the almshouses which have now taken
its place. Shire Hall Yard was bounded on the north
by the ancient buildings of Christ's Hospital, and on the
west by Foundation Street, the thoroughfare in which
Gainsborough dwelt. The advertisement in the Ipswich
Journal does not define the position of his house beyond
saying that it faced the Shire Hall, but I have been able
to trace its exact site by the aid of a passage in the diary
of Thomas Green, the Ipswich poet and wTiter, to whom
EARLY DAYS 23
we owe some valuable notes on Gainsborough. Thomas
Green was not born until ten years after the painter
had left Ipswich, but he was deeply interested in Gains-
borough and liked to gossip about him with older inhabi-
tants such as the Mrs. Dupuis, whom he quotes more
than once. I have discovered that this lady was the
daughter of Gainsborough's lifelong friend, Samuel
Kilderbee of Ipswich. In April 1818, Green writes in
his diary : " Much chat with Mrs. Dupuis respecting
Gainsborough, who Hved here on the site Mr. Tunney's
house now occupies. His wife Margaret, natural daughter
of the Duke of Bedford." This chance mention of Mr.
Tunney by Green has enabled me to identify the spot on
which Gainsborough's house stood.
Shire Hall Yard, as I have already explained, ad-
joined Foundation Street. The space corresponding to
the Yard on the opposite side of the street was in great
part occupied by a playing-field belonging to the Grammar
School, and Pennington's large and excellent plan of
Ipswich, published in 1778, indicates only one house
that corresponds with the description in the advertise-
ment, " opposite the Shire Hall." The plan shows this
house on the west side of Foundation Street, at the
corner of the northern boundary of the playing-field.
Standing close to the street, the house had a frontage of
about thirty feet, with small outbuildings to the north
and west, and a garden in the rear ninety feet in length,
in which the careful Pennington has even indicated the
position of the flower beds. Only one thing could throw
any doubt on the probability that this house was Gains-
borough's, and that was the date of the plan. It was not
published until nineteen years after the artist had left
Ipswich for Bath, and in the interval the locality might
have undergone some change. But the connection of the
house with Mr. Tunney in the note in Thomas Green's
diary makes everything clear.
The Rev. R. J. Tunney, who was chaplain of the
24 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
County Gaol, was married in Ipswich in Waterloo Year,
and lived for a long period in Foundation Street, where
he died at an advanced age in 1854. Foundation Street
is unnumbered in the earlier directories of the town,
and it was impossible to find out from them in what
part of the street Mr. Tunney lived, but this difficulty
was overcome by the courtesy of the editor of the East
Anglian Daily Times. He published a letter from me
asking for information, which brought forth replies from
several correspondents who had been pupils at the
Grammar School about 1850, and remembered Mr.
Tunney's house as standing in Foundation Street at the
northern corner of the playground. This, of course, was
the identical spot upon which Pennington, in 1778, had
indicated, on his large plan, the only house then standing
" opposite the Shire Hall " — the house of Gainsborough's
upon the site of which, as Green says, that of Tunney
was built. The Grammar School (where Sir Edward
Poynter was a pupil) has long been removed to the
suburbs of the town, and the old playground is now
built over. But Mr. F. C. Gower of Ipswich, one of the
correspondents referred to, was kind enough to examine
carefully the houses in Foundation Street, and he says
that there is not the slightest doubt that No. 34 (next
door to the vicarage of St. Mary Quay) is the one that
he remembers as standing at the corner of the play-
ground in 1850, and then in the occupation of old Mr.
Tunney, who used to complain, not infrequently, of the
damage done to his flower-beds by the footballs and
other missiles sent over the wall by the Grammar School
boys. It was from the end of the garden at what is
now No. 34 Foundation Street, that Tom Peartree stood
watching the windfalls on the grass until Gainsborough,
catching sight of the rustic leaning over the wall,^ called
him into the studio and painted the effigy that is shown
at Christchurch Mansion.
A few weeks after Gainsborough's departure for Bath
EARLY DAYS 25
an advertisement appeared in the Ipswich Journal which
gives us some idea of the accommodation of the house in
which the painter had Hved :
" To BE Let at Lady Day Next. A House in the
Key Parish, facing the Shire Hall in Ipswich, late in the
occupation of Mr. Gainsborough ; consisting of a Hall,
two Parlours, a Kitchen, Wash-house ; with a Garden and
Stable, good Cellars, and well supplied with Cock Water ;
five Chambers and Garrets with other conveniencies.
For further particulars apply to Mrs. Rasse, in Ipswich."
Of Mrs. Rasse I know nothing, but she was no doubt
connected with Mr. Thomas Rasse, grocer, of Ipswich,
who a few years earlier was seeking for a tenant for what,
by the description, was evidently the same house in the
Key Parish. Mr. Rasse's advertisement, published in
January 1752, stated that the house in the Key Parish,
" now in the occupation of the Rev. Mr. Broom," would
be vacant in the following June, and at that time,
or soon afterwards, it was no doubt taken by Gains-
borough, who probably moved from Sudbury to Ipswich
about 1752, and not, as Fulcher says, in 1745 or 1746.
Fulcher's statement has been accepted by most of the
later biographers, but that it is inaccurate is proved by
the newly discovered letter to which I have referred.
This shows that Gainsborough was still living in Sudbury
and painting there in 1748. It seems likely that Gains-
borough's stay in Ipswich was much shorter than has
been supposed, and that he did not settle in the town
till he took Mr. Rasse's house in 1752 or thereabouts.
This theory is supported by Thicknesse, who says : " Soon
after his remove to Ipswich I was appointed Lieutenant-
Governor of Landguard Fort, not far distant." The date
of Thicknesse's appointment was 1753.
Gainsborough, when he went from the town of his
adoption to seek a wider field in the gay and fashionable
western city, left behind him a sincere admirer and fol-
lower, whose studies and sketches of Old Ipswich are of
26 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
peculiar interest to-day. This was George Frost, of whom
Constable speaks in a letter written from Suffolk in 1797
to J. T. Smith, in answer to an inquiry from that enter-
taining old gossip for local information about Gains-
borough. Smith, who in his youth had been acquainted
with the painter, and has left us some amusing reminis-
cences of him, thought that Constable — a Suffolk man
revisiting his native county only nine years after Gains-
borough's death — might have been able to glean some
anecdotes. He was mistaken, for Constable came across
little worth recording except a vague story of the musical
club at Ipswich, of some of whose members Gainsborough
painted the portraits. He was himself a member of the
club, " and was generally the butt of the company, and
his wig was to them a fund of amusement, as it was often
snatched from his head and thrown about the room. . . .
I believe in Ipswich they did not know his value till they
lost him."
Constable, in this letter, mentions Frost as an Ipswich
drawing-master who sought inspiration on Gainsborough's
old sketching-grounds by the Orwell, but he was also a
collector of Gainsborough's pictures. Frost, at the time
of his death, was possessed of numerous drawings from
the hand of the master, and one treasure that was more
valuable than any of them, Gainsborough's famous pic-
ture of The Mall, St. James's Park. At Ipswich Frost
lived in Gainsborough's parish close to St. Mary Key
(Quay), which is distinguished among the many other
ancient churches of Ipswich by the great key that forms
its weathercock. The studies he has left of Ipswich
and its neighbourhood give us the best existing pictures
of the surroundings of Gainsborough in the first of the
three periods of his life as a painter.
Many of the numerous landscapes and portraits pro-
duced by Gainsborough at Ipswich have, unfortunately,
disappeared, and among them the view of Landguard
Fort which he was commissioned by Thicknesse to
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EARLY DAYS 27
paint for the sum of fifteen guineas. This picture was
destroyed by the dampness of the wall upon which it was
hung, but copies of the print of it by Major are still in
existence. Among the surviving portraits are the Admiral
Vernon, now in the National Portrait Gallery, and painted
probably when that gallant sailor was member of Par-
liament for Ipswich ; the study in the National Gallery
of The Painter's Daughters ; and the earher portraits of
the Hingeston family, exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery
in 1885. The Hingestons were Suffolk people and friends
of Gainsborough, and in their house at Southwold The
Painter's Daughters is supposed at one time to have hung.
Judging by the apparent age of the children, the charming
study of Margaret and Mary Gainsborough in the Victoria
and Albert Museum must date from about the same
period as the National Gallery painting. The Museum
portrait, in which one of the little girls is seen with her
hand placed on her sister's head, once belonged to John
Jackson, RA. From him it passed into the possession
of Macready the actor and John Forster, between whom
the canvas was divided, one head going to each purchaser.
John Forster ultimately acquired both, and bequeathed
the two portraits, once more united, to the Victoria and
Albert Museum.
It is likely that one of Gainsborough's rustic subject
pictures was painted at Ipswich, as an engraving of it
was published only a few months after the artist had left
Suffolk. W^en this picture. The Rural Lovers, was
engraved, it was the property of Mr. Panton Betew, a
silversmith and dealer in pictures who had frequently
sold small early works for Gainsborough, as he recalled to
J. T. Smith after the painter had become famous. " Well,"
said he, " there is your great Mr. Gainsborough. I
have many and many a time had a drawing of his in
my shop window before he went to Bath ; ay, and he has
often been glad to receive seven or eight shillings from
me for what I have sold."
CHAPTER II
BATH, 1760 -1766
From east to west — Gainsborough settles in Bath in 1759 — The theory
of an earher visit to the city discredited — The Whitehead letter
not written from Bath — The Town and Country Magazine — Where
Gainsborough lived in Bath — Abbey Churchyard — Lansdowne
Road — The Circus — Gainsborough's portrait of Mrs. Thicknesse —
He exhibits at the Society of Artists — His first press notice —
Garrick's letter on Quin's portrait — Jealousy of Hudson — Wiltshire,
the Bath carrier — Gainsborough's banking account — His wife's
mysterious annuity — His death reported — He exhibits Garrick's
portrait — An adverse newspaper criticism — The Rev. William
Peters — The Festoon.
Gainsborough, as we have seen, disposed of his furni-
ture and many of his pictures at Ipswich in October 1759,
and crossed England from east to west to try his fortune
in Bath, that centre of fashion and gaiety in which he
was to spend the next fourteen or fifteen years of his hfe.
There is a theory that he had already passed a winter in
Bath before leaving Ipswich for good, but the evidence in
support of this appears upon examination to be untrust-
worthy. It is contained in a letter, given by several of
Gainsborough's biographers as written by "UTiitehead to
Lord Harcourt, from Bath, under date December 5,
1758. " We have a painter here," says Whitehead, " who
takes the most exact likenesses I ever saw. His painting
is coarse and slight, but has ease and spirit. Lord
VilHers sat to him before he left Bath, and I hope we shall
be able to bring his picture to town with us, as it is he
himself, and is preferable in my opinion to the finest
unlike picture in the universe, though it might serve for
a sign ; he sate only twice. The painter's name is Gains-
borough." In newspaper articles this has been cited
28
BATH, 1760-1766 29
again and again during the last three or four years as a
proof that Gainsborough was painting at Bath in 1758.
As quoted Whitehead's letter seems convincing, but a
closer examination shows it to be a careless and inaccurate
copy of the original transcript in The Harcourt Papers.
In the first place the letter is dated December the 6th,
not the 5th, and is addressed not to Lord Harcourt but
to Lord Nuneham. These mistakes are unimportant,
but not so is the statement that the letter was written
from Bath. In The Harcourt Papers it is dated " Mid-
diet on." There are many Middletons in England, but
the reference to Lord Villiers suggests that Gainsborough
at the time this letter was written was painting portraits
of some of the Villiers family at Middleton Park. William
Whitehead's connection with Middleton was peculiarly
intimate as he was tutor to Lord Villiers, and when he
says, " We have a painter here," he means at the seat near
Bicester of the Earl of Jersey, the father of Lord Villiers,
who was at this time a young man of three or four and
twenty. It seems reasonable to suppose that if Gains-
borough were staying at Middleton to paint portraits.
Lord Villiers— the eldest son of the house— sat to him
there, and that it was from Middleton that Whitehead
hoped to bring his portrait to town. Perhaps Whitehead
missed a word in his letter and intended to write, " Lord
Villiers sat to him before he left (for) Bath " ?
A curious article that has some bearing on this subject
is to be found in the Town and Country Magazine of Sep-
tember 1772, but it can hardly be taken seriously. It is
anonymous, and purports to be composed of extracts
from the diary of 1758 of a man deceased. He is de-
scribed as having had a mania for seeking out geniuses,
and we are told that in November 1758, some time before
his death, he went to Ipswich in search of an artist named
Gainsborough, who was said to be living there. Ar-
rived at the Suffolk town he asks the landlord of the inn
where Mr. Gainsborough the painter lives. " He has not
30 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
lived here a good while, sir." " No ! where then ? "
" I believe he is at Bath, sir." The genius-hunter hastens
to Bath, finds the artist's house, and after one or two
rebuffs is admitted to the painting-room and has a brief
conversation with Gainsborough. He calls again the
next day, and is allowed to see some of the works of the
artist, who himself remains invisible. However, the
honours of the studio are done by a communicative friend
of Gainsborough's, who gives the inquisitive stranger a
singular and obviously inaccurate account of the reasons
that had induced the genius to settle at Bath. The
friend says that he has known Gainsborough for years ;
that at first he was only a landscape painter, and as such
must have starved, had not an accident brought him to
Bath, " where, by way of amusement, he painted the
heads of a few of his acquaintances ; the likeness was too
perfect not to strike every one. He then, upon the advice
of his friends, professed himself — what he is so admirably
calculated for — a portrait-painter."
This, of course, is nonsense. Gainsborough practised
at Ipswich as a professional portrait -painter for years
before he went to Bath. Thicknesse, when he called on
Gainsborough at Ipswich in 1753, saw several portraits
in his studio, and that he had numerous commissions of
a similar nature we know from his letters of 1757 and
1758. Equally impossible to accept is the supposed
statement of the Ipswich innkeeper that in November
1758 Gainsborough had already left Ipswich " a good
while." We know now that he did not leave Ipswich
until the end of October 1759. The article in the Town
and Country Magazine is amusing, but it reads sus-
piciously like a joke, and was perhaps written by some
Bath wag to tease Gainsborough, who by the time it was
pubhshed, late in 1772, had attained to a position second
only to that of Reynolds in the public estimation. Some
such idea as this may have crossed the mind of the editor
of the magazine, as he would not publish the article until
BATH, 1760-1766 31
it had been altered and amended. In any case, an
anonymous communication alleged to be founded on the
diary of a nameless man written many years earlier
should have no weight against the direct evidence of
Philip Thicknesse, who in 1759 had a house in Bath, and
was one of the several friends of the painter who pre-
vailed upon him to remove there from Ipswich.
Thicknesse, who in this matter could have no motive
for prevarication, says : " After Gainsborough's arrival
in Bath I accompanied him in search of lodgings, where
a good painting-room as to hght, a proper access, &c.,
could be had, and upon our return to my house, where
his wife was impatiently awaiting the event, he told her
he had seen lodgings of fifty pounds a year, in the Church-
yard, which he thought might answer his purpose."
From this it is evident that Gainsborough was visiting
Bath for the first time, and was a stranger to the place.
If he had spent the preceding winter painting portraits
in Bath he would not have required a guide to help him
find lodgings and a studio.
The exact locality of the house or houses in which
the painter hved during his residence in Bath is as vague
as most things connected with Gainsborough's career.
Local antiquarians have placed him in this house and
the other, but in no case that I have discovered do they
give any evidence in support of their assertions. Mr.
F. Shum, F.S.A., writing in 1875, says : " The conclusion
i have arrived at is that Gainsborough first occupied
rooms in the Abbey Churchyard, then a centre of attrac-
tion. Then he took a house in AinsHe's Belvedere. . . .
Afterwards he moved to a detached house in Lansdowne
Road, known as Lansdowne Lodge, but during the greater
part of the time he was in Bath he occupied a house in
The Circus, either Doctor Spender's, No. 17, or one of the
houses on either side." In 1883, the late Mr. R. E. M.
Peach, writing in his Historic Houses in Bath, improves
upon Mr. Shum by saying that Thicknesse, after bringing
32 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
Gainsborough to Bath, " induced him to take apartments
at 14 Abbey Churchyard at £50 per annum." Is there
any reason, I wonder, for this most definite statement,
or is it mere conjecture based on the fact that Thicknesse
mentions the Churchyard and £50 ? It should be remem-
bered that he does not say that Gainsborough took the
rooms. Mr. Peach agrees with Mr. Shum about Ainshe's
Belvedere, but discards the detached residence in Lans-
downe Road, and as to The Circus places Gainsborough,
not at No. 17 or one of the adjoining houses, but at
No. 24. Further he adds to the general uncertainty by
mentioning that the late Dr. Wilbraham Falconer always
believed that Gainsborough lived at the house in The
Circus once tenanted by his grandfather. Dr. Thomas
Falconer, which was No. 29.
By 1902 the local historians appear to have made up
their differences about the house in The Circus and to
have declared for No. 24, as a memorial tablet was placed
upon its front describing it as the former residence of the
artist. Sir Walter Armstrong, as an authority upon
Gainsborough, visited Bath in June 1902, for the purpose
of unveiling the tablet, which ceremony was performed
with proper state in the presence of the Mayor and
Corporation. Sir Walter made a lengthy speech, in the
course of which he spoke about the disputed origin and
dates of the picture of The Blue Boy, and in reference to
Gainsborough's house said that the artist lived at No. 24
The Circus for fourteen years. In this Sir Walter was
mistaken. Fourteen years would cover the whole period
of Gainsborough's residence in Bath, and it is easy to show
that he did not take the house in The Circus until six or
seven years after the date of his settlement in the city.
The Bath Chronicle of January 30, 1766, contains the fol-
lowing advertisement :
" To be Lett, Ready Furnish'd and entered upon
immediately, a house in Lansdowne Road, Bath, three
doors this side of Mr. Gainsborough's, consisting of three
BATH, 1760-1766 33
rooms on a floor, an exceeding good kitchen, servants'
hall, &c., with plenty of water and a garden fifty yards
deep. Enquire of George Jesson, Esq., at Mr. Taylor's,
Cutler, in the Market Place, or at Mr. Morgan's Coffee
House."
This shows that Gainsborough was living in Lans-
downe Road in 1766. How long he had been there I
have been unable to discover, but an advertisement in
another paper, fourteen months later, shows that by that
time he was settled in The Circus. Probably he removed
to The Circus about Christmas 1766 ; as the following
advertisement, from the Bath Journal of March 16, 1767,
seems to indicate that he has recently left Lansdowne
Road and is trying to find a tenant for the house he has
vacated :
"To be Lett, and entered upon immediately, a neat
Dwelling House pleasantly situated above the Turn-
pike, Lansdowne Road, Bath. For particulars enquire of
Mr. Gainsborough, in The Circus."
The house was still unlet in September 1767, when it
was described in another advertisement as having a good
garden, and with " a very good cold bath adjoining " ;
and as situated in Lansdowne Road, and " late in the
occupation of Mr. Gainsborough." These advertisements
in the Bath papers prove that Gainsborough Hved for
some time in Lansdowne Road, and that the period of his
residence in the aristocratic Circus could not have ex-
tended to much more than seven years. To those un-
acquainted with Bath it should be explained that Lans-
downe Road is a thoroughfare leading by a sharp ascent
to the open country on the north-west, and commanding
magnificent views from its highest point. AinsUe's Bel-
vedere, where Shum and Peach allege that Gainsborough
lived for a time, is a group of houses adjoining Lansdowne
Road on the summit of the hill.
The tablet unveiled by Sir Walter Armstrong is still
to be seen in The Circus, but there seems to be no par-
c
34 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
ticular reason why it was affixed to No. 24 in preference
to any of the remaining twenty-nine houses. The Cor-
poration appears to have been guided in this matter by
the opinion of R. E. M. Peach, but unfortunately the
author of Historic Houses in Bath has left us no evidence
in favour of the attribution to No. 24. Mr. T. Sturge
Cotterell, who was a member of the committee appointed
to affix the Gainsborough tablet, has given me all the
information in his power ; and the Town Clerk of Bath,
Mr. Frederick D. Wardle, kindly allowed me to examine
the contemporary rate and other books at the Guildhall.
But I have found nothing to support the Peach theory,
and Gainsborough is unmentioned in any of the Corpo-
ration's documents. The Circus is in Walcot parish,
which in the eighteenth century made its own rates, and
the only place in Bath in which I came across Gains-
borough's name in a contemporary official record was the
vestry of Walcot Church. There, in an old rate-book
of 1767, it is stated that " Mr. Gainsbury " was called
upon to pay an assessment of 24s. for his house in The
Circus. The list in the book gives the names of twenty-
five other ratepayers in The Circus, but it is of little value
as a guide to the position of Gainsborough's house.
Even if the names are given in regular sequence, which
is by no means certain, there is nothing to show where
the collector made his first call.
The only clue — if it is worthy of being called one — is
that the name of the Duke of Bedford is almost in the
middle of the list. The Duke lived at No. 15, one of the
two central houses of the northern block, and as his name
is farther down the list than that of Lord Chatham,
who lived at No. 7, it is likely that the collector began at
the western comer of Gay Street, which is the principal
approach to The Circus from the older part of Bath, and
worked his way round to Gay Street again. If he did
this, and his lists were made with any sort of method,
Gainsborough must have lived in the northern block of
BATH, 1760-1766 35
The Circus, as his name is the third in order after that of
the Duke of Bedford. The third house after the Duke's
is to-day No. 18 The Circus, and it is curious that Shum,
writing nearly forty years ago, should have placed
Gainsborough " either at Dr. Spender's, No. 17, or at
one of the houses on either side." Shum, like Peach,
gives no reason for his statement, but it is possible that
he may have seen the Walcot rate-book from which I
have quoted.
The identification of the house in The Circus is made
difficult to-day by the fact that when Gainsborough lived
in Bath the principal streets were not numbered. It was
customary for the dweller in The Circus to give his address
in some such fashion as " the third door from Gay Street,"
or " the second door from Bennett Street in the North-
ward Flank," but Gainsborough himself seems to have
thought addresses of very little consequence. His ad-
vertisement of the " neat dwelling house " is the only
instance I know of in which he mentions The Circus by
name, and it is only twice referred to in all the existing
correspondence by, and about him. His own address
was " Mr. Gainsborough, Bath," and some of the letters
written by him from Bath to the great actor who was
his friend and patron, have nothing on the outer sheets
but " David Garrick, Esq., London," and the postmark.
Although with our present knowledge it is impossible
to say exactly which house in The Circus Gainsborough
occupied, there is good reason for doubting that it was
No. 24, the house in the south-eastern block which now
bears the memorial tablet. The reason is to be found
in another contemporary advertisement. In the Bath
Chronicle of February 27, 1772, Mr. Evatt, a Bath auc-
tioneer, announces the forthcoming sale of the furniture
and entire contents of a house in The Circus. These in-
clude numbers of handsome cabinets, tables, " sophas "
and mirrors ; and silk-damask window curtains, " aether "
down quilts, pictures, and " a Hbrary of books." All are
36 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
described as " The property of a gentleman, to be sold at
his house, the seventh door in The Circus on the right
from Gay Street." The seventh door in The Circus on
the right from Gay Street is that of No. 24. It seems
from this that Gainsborough could not have been Hving
at No. 24 in the spring of 1772, unless we can beheve that
he was the gentleman to whom the furniture belonged,
and that he sold by auction everything in his house more
than two years before he left Bath for London.
Gainsborough, when he settled in Bath, found his chief
rival in William Hoare, afterwards a Royal Academician,
who had long enjoyed the principal patronage of the place.
The elder Pitt was among the admirers of William Hoare,
and gave some good commissions to him and to his
brother. Prince Hoare. However, in spite of rival artists,
Gainsborough was in full practice as a portrait-painter
within twelve months after he left Ipswich, as we know
from the correspondence of Mrs. Delany, who, on the
23rd of October 1760, writes from Bath to her friend
Mrs. Dewes :
" This morning went with Lady Westmoreland to see
Mr. Gainsborough's pictures (the man that painted
Mr. Wise and Mr. Lucy), and they may well be called
what Mr. Webb tmjustly says of Rubens, ' they are
splendid impositions.' There I saw Miss Ford's picture,
a whole length with her guitar, a most extraordinary
figure, handsome and bold ; but I should be very sorry
to have any one I loved set forth in such a manner."
Miss Ford afterwards became the wife of Philip Thick-
nesse, and the portrait mentioned is the one to which
the ex-Governor refers in his sketch of Gainsborough's
life, when dealing with the misunderstanding with the
artist at Bath in 1774. It is still in existence, and was
exhibited in 1894 at the Winter Exhibition of the Royal
Academy. The portrait is particularly interesting as one
of the first fruits of the painter's Bath period, in which
his genius developed in a manner that was Httle short of
BATH, 1760-1766 37
miraculous. The word genius is frequently misapplied
when speaking of painters, but if any one of them has a
claim to that title it is surely Gainsborough. There is
nothing in the history of the English School to be com-
pared with his career. A country boy, he is sent at
thirteen to study art in London at a time when oppor-
tunities for learning to draw and paint were few and poor.
He picks up what cnimbs of instruction he can, and at
eighteen goes back to Suffolk, where he lives for fourteen
years in dull country towns, cut off from the society of
artists, unless we can distinguish by that title the house
and coach-painters, Joshua Kirby and Andrew Baldrey.
From Ipswich Gainsborough passes to Bath, and without
any further experience except such as he may have ac-
quired by seeing pictures in private collections begins
almost at once to produce those remarkable portraits,
the painting of which places him with Reynolds at the
head of the English School.
Eighteen months after his arrival at Bath Gains-
borough for the first time challenged the criticism of
London artists by sending to the exhibition at Spring
Gardens a full-length portrait of Mr. Nugent. This was
in April 1761, when by a happy coincidence his friend
Joshua Kirby was also attracting public attention.
Kirby was at this time honoured by an audience with
the King, and presented to his Majesty in person a copy
of his new work on perspective. In 1762 Gainsborough
sent a second picture to Spring Gardens, where the
catalogue of the Society of Artists was this year graced
by an introduction from the pen of Dr. Johnson. This
second picture brought forth the earliest newspaper
criticism of Gainsborough's work that I have been able
to trace. It is in the St. James's Chronicle. " Mr. Gains-
borough. No. 30. A whole length of a Gentleman with
a Gun. A good portrait and a Pleasing Likeness of
Mr. Poyntz. The Dog well done." Thus encouraged
the young painter sent three pictures to the exhibition
38 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
of 1763. a landscape and portraits of Miss Edgeworth's
relative, Mr. Medlicott, and of Ouin the actor, who was
at this time living at Bath. It is curious that Walpole
in criticising Gainsborough's work at this exhibition
attributes what he regards as a fault to the influence of
the man who was to be his lifelong rival. Walpole is,
I think, mistaken, but his note is interesting as the first
known instance of the association of the names of Rey-
nolds and Gainsborough. Walpole praises the portrait
of Mr. Medhcott, but says that Gainsborough's land-
scape is tawdry, " a fault most of the landscape painters
have caught from Reynolds."
Mr. Poyntz, who was one of the sitters of 1762, was
the uncle of Miss Georgiana Spencer, then a child of five
or six, of whom Gainsborough painted at this time a
portrait that is now at Althorp. Years afterwards this
little girl, grown into the most famous beauty of her
time, sat to him again as Duchess of Devonshire.
It was in the early years at Bath that the friendship
began between Gainsborough and Garrick, a friendship
that remained unbroken until the death of the actor in
1779. Gainsborough's opinion of Garrick was extra-
vagantly good, as he shows in his letters to Henderson.
" Garrick," he says, " is the greatest creature hving in
every respect : he is worth studying in every action.
Every view and every idea of him is worthy of being
stored up for imitation ; and I have ever found him a
sincere and generous friend." A letter written by Gar-
rick in 1763, immediately after the exhibition of Gains-
borough's portrait of Ouin, shows that it had attracted
considerable attention in London, and had aroused the
jealousy of some of the older painters in the metropolis.
The letter, which throws some light on the character of
Hudson, the teacher of Sir Joshua Reynolds, is dated June
20, 1763. Garrick wTites from London to Quin at Bath :
" I must say a word or two upon the behaviour, the
most unaccountable behaviour, of your friend Hudson ;
BATH, 1760-1766 39
3^ou remember our bargain, and although partly made in
the warmth of our cups last summer, yet it was as sacred
to me as if it had been struck and ratified over our tea
and toast and butter. I sent to him, as we agreed, to let
him know when I should be ready to sit to him ; he was
not at that time disengaged. I then wTote to him that
I would attend his friendly summons (those were my
words) any morning at his own hour by giving me notice
over-night — no answer to this. I then met him in Maiden
Lane ; he begged my pardon and seemed in high good
humour and promised to send to me. From that time
to this I have not had the least excuse or message from
him, and I shall tell him my mind when I see him. I
have considered again and again whether I might inad-
vertently have given him any slight cause for suspicion —
for as you know he is a sensitive plant (and not a sensible
plant as a lady called it in our garden) — and upon my
honour I have behaved with the most dehcate attention
to him.
" It was hinted to me that the much, and deservedly,
admired picture of you by Gainsborough has piqued him
not a little, and hinc illo lacrimcB ! If it is so I sin-
cerely pity him, for there is merit sufficient in that por-
trait to warm the most stoical painter, and what must it
do when it works among the combustibles of our friend
Hudson ? "
The portrait of Quin became the property later of
Walter Wiltshire, the Bath carrier in whom Gainsborough
found a friend and patron. Allan Cunningham in his
gossip about Gainsborough and " the honest carrier,"
who is said to have charged the artist nothing for
taking his pictures to town, conveys a wrong impression
of Mr. Wiltshire's position, Cunningham's description
gives the idea of a man who drove his own horse and cart,
but in reality Wiltshire was a kind of West Country
Pickford, who had a large and flourishing business and
regular services of waggons, " flying " and otherwise,
between his warehouses in Broad Street, Bath, and the
\\Tiite Swan at Holbom Bridge. He was one of Bath's
important citizens, and when he was elected Mayor in
40 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
1772, he gave a fashionable entertainment to the gentry
and others at the Town Hall that caused much offence to
" the people in trade " who were not invited. Gains-
borough no doubt was present, for he was a frequent guest
of Wiltshire's at his seat at Shockerwick, a few miles from
Bath. Wiltshire acquired many pictures by Gains-
borough, some of which remained at Shockerwick for two
or three generations. The Wiltshire collection was dis-
persed at Christie's in 1867, when Quin's portrait was pur-
chased by the Duke of Cleveland for 132 guineas. This
portrait was described in the catalogue of the sale as hav-
ing been bequeathed by Gainsborough to Wiltshire, and
the story has been generally accepted. It is, however,
without foundation, as Gainsborough made no bequests
outside his owti family. The beautiful study of Orpin,
Parish Clerk of Bradford, Wiltshire, was bought for 310
guineas on behalf of the National Gallery, whose Director
made a brave effort to obtain a more famous Gains-
borough, The Harvest Waggon, but was outbid by a dealer,
who secured the prize for 2950 guineas.
It is well known that The Harvest Waggon was given
by Gainsborough to Wiltshire, who had previously pre-
sented him with the grey horse shown in the picture. I
found some new information about this transaction in a
manuscript note by the late J. H. Anderdon, to whom
we owe the compilation of the useful " extended "
Academy catalogues at Burlington House and the British
Museum. Anderdon, when at Bath in 1841, made the
acquaintance of the carrier's son, to whom the Shocker-
wick estate and pictures had descended, and Mr. Wiltshire
told him that the grey horse was one that Gainsborough
had been accustomed to ride. When he removed to
London in the summer of 1774 he took the horse with
him, and as he could not induce the carrier to accept fifty
guineas for the animal, sent him the picture instead.
A frequent companion of Gainsborough in his rides
in the neighbourhood of Bath was Sir Uvedale Price,
BATH, 1760-1766 41
who has left us an interesting note on the character of
the painter and the soothing effect upon his mind of
the rustic sceneiy he loved so well to paint. " When
Gainsborough lived at Bath," says Sir Uvedale, " I
often made excursions with him into the country around.
He was a man of eager, irritable mind, though he attached
himself warmly to those he liked. Though of a lively
and playful imagination yet was he at times severe and
sarcastic, but when we have come near to cottages and
village scenes with groups of children, and objects of
rural life that struck his fancy, I have observed his
countenance to take an expression of gentleness and
complacency."
Quin, who was always on the best of terms with Gains-
borough, and left him a legacy, is mentioned by the
painter in a letter written a few weeks after Garrick
wrote to praise the portrait in the London exhibition
and to complain of Hudson. Gainsborough's letter is
addressed to Lord Royston, the eldest son of the great
lawyer. Lord Hardwicke, who was both Lord Chancellor
and the father of a Lord Chancellor.
" Bath, July 21, 1763.
" My Lord, — I should have answered your Lordship's
obliging letter sooner, but was from home when it came
and returned but yesterday, I am now about your
Lordship's picture, and shall spare no pains to make it
as good a picture as I possibly can ; but for fear I should
not be able to complete it in time enough for Lord Hard-
wicke to have it at his country house when his Lordship
leaves town I should be much obhged if your Lordship
will be pleased to give orders that it may not be opened
in London but forwarded immediately on its arrival,
into the country, as I shall paper it up to secure the dust
from lodging on the surface of the picture. The payment
of the money would be soon enough when your Lordship
comes again to Bath. But, if your Lordship is uneasy
till the debt is discharged, Mr. Hoare, Banker at Temple
Bar, will give a proper receipt in my name.
"His Grace the Duke of Devonshire left Bath about
42 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
three weeks since, and Mr, Quin told me he himself
was going to Chatsworth to stay a few weeks. Dr.
Moisy (Moysey) has had a severe fit of the ague, and
(as I am told) says he could make himself very easy with
the loss of his money if he could get rid of the ague.
But whether the loss of his money might not bring on
a shaking fit that formed itself into an ague, I must leave,
" I am, your Lordship's most obedient and most obhged
humble servant,
" Thomas Gainsborough."
The reference in this letter to Gainsborough's banker
is, I believe, the only one that is to be found in his cor-
respondence. The bank of Messrs. Hoare " at Temple
Bar " is as familiar to Londoners to-day as it was to their
predecessors of a hundred and fifty years ago, and the
ledgers are still in existence in which Gainsborough's
transactions are recorded. They show that the remain-
der of the money owing by Lord Royston to Gains-
borough was twenty guineas, and that the sum remained
unpaid until August 1764, by which time Lord Hardwicke
was dead and Lord Royston had succeeded to the Earl-
dom.. Gainsborough opened an account with Messrs.
Hoare in 1762, and his name remained on their books
until 1785, but his dealings with the firm were not exten-
sive, although in one respect peculiarly interesting. The
painter could have had little occasion for a banker's ser-
vices, for he was not a man of business and most of his
receipts and payments were probably in cash. His ac-
count with Messrs. Hoare dealt almost exclusively with
an annuity payable to him, of £200 a year. This, no
doubt, was the mysterious annuity of that amount which
was left to Mrs. Gainsborough by some one whose name
has never transpired. Gainsborough's daughters told an
informant of Fulcher's that the annuity was regularly
transmitted through a London bank, but that they knew
nothing of the source from whence it came. Messrs.
Hoare, to whose courtesy I am much indebted for the
particulars concerning Gainsborough's account, were
Gainsborougli
BATH, 1760-1766 43
kind enough to search their books with a view to
obtaining further information about his addresses
at Bath, but the search, unfortunately, proved fruit-
less.
It is interesting to recall here that several members
of the Hoare family were numbered among Gains-
borough's patrons. Mr. Henry Hoare, the banker of
Temple Bar with whom the account was opened in 1762,
had a gallery of pictures in his country house at Stourhead,
Wiltshire, and his collection was the first of importance to
which a landscape by Gainsborough was admitted.
The Bath Journal, which, in common with its rival
the Bath Chronicle, rarely mentioned Gainsborough, broke
through its reserve in this year of 1763 by a surprising an-
nouncement that must have caused some anxiety to the
artist's friends. In its issue of October 17th, the Bath
Journal published the following among other notes on
the events of the preceding week : " Friday— The same
day died Mr. Gainsborough, an eminent Painter of this
City." This curt statement was followed by an equally
curt correction in the paper of October 24. " ^Ir. Gains-
borough, an eminent Limner of this City, is not dead as
mentioned in our last."
Gilly Williams, in a letter written in 1764, gives a
curious gUmpse of some of the odd people who were among
Gainsborough's sitters at this time. " Sir Onesiphorus
Paul and his Lady are the finest couple that has been
seen here since Bath was built. They have bespoke two
whole length pictures which some time or other will
divert us. His dress and manner are beyond my paint-
ing ; however, they may come within Mr. Gainsborough's ;
that is the painter by whom, if you remember, we once
saw the caricature of old Winchelsea." Unfortunately
Gainsborough did not send the portrait of Sir Onesiphorus
to divert the Society of Artists. It was never exhibited,
and his only contribution to Spring Gardens in 1764 was
a portrait, said to have been that of Joshua Kir by.
44 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
In January, 1765, the King granted a charter of
incorporation to the Society of Artists, and on the nth
of March Gainsborough came up from Bath to London
to attend the general meeting of the Society at the
Turk's Head Tavern, Soho, and after signing the obliga-
tion was formally admitted a Fellow. When the annual
exhibition at Spring Gardens was opened a few weeks
later, the Public Advertiser invited its readers to criticise
the gallery, where Gainsborough was showing portraits
of General Hon3'WOod and Colonel Nugent. The invita-
tion brought forth only a single letter, from " N," but
this happens to be about the large equestrian study of
General Honywood, whom Gainsborough depicted riding
through a forest. " N " writes :
" In consequence of the general invitation to your
correspondents to send you remarks on the present ex-
hibition at Spring Gardens, give me leave to tell you
that I have been to see it, and on looking at the
much admired picture of General Honywood on horse-
back, done by Gainsborough, I found a scabbard to
the General's sword wanting. He is painted in full
regimentals with his broad-sword in his hand, and as his
left side is presented to you anybody must be judge of
this impropriety."
The omission of the scabbard, evidently regarded at
the time as an error on the part of the artist, is
noticed by Fulcher as " an implied compliment, per-
chance, to the General's bravery."
A portrait of Garrick, perhaps the one now in the
possession of the Corporation of Stratford-on-Avon, was
shown at Gainsborough's studio in the early spring of
1766, and was the subject of some foohsh lines attri-
buted to the pen of Derrick, the Master of the Ceremonies
at Bath. The Garrick, with two other portraits and a
landscape, were sent to London and exhibited at Spring
Gardens in April, when for the first time Gainsborough's
work was unkindly criticised in print. The offending
journal was the before-mentioned Public Advertiser,
GENERAL HONYWOOD
Copyright, Messrs. Thomas Agnew &■ Sons
BATH, 1760-1766 45
which in noticing " A Gentleman, Whole Length " (50),
by Gainsborough, says :
" This Gentleman it seems is done for Mr. Garrick, as
he has his arm about a stone bust of Shakespeare ; and
indeed he seems as fond of it as if some benevolent God
had metamorphosized him into the same substance. Mr.
Gainsborough should have been particularly careful how
he had drawn from an original which a Reynolds and
a Zoffani hath so admirably pourtrayed ; however, he
has been more happy in his other whole length of a
gentleman, and in his others equally miserable. I fancy
Mr. Gainsborough has been troubled with ague lately, or
got the falling sickness."
Fulcher says that this was the portrait of Garrick in
the painting of which the actor annoyed and puzzled
Gainsborough by contorting and twisting his face. The
story of Garrick's behaviour is not credited by Fulcher,
but it may have some foundation. Thicknesse, who was
living at Bath when the portrait was in progress, says
that Gainsborough excused himself on this account for
what he regarded as his failure in painting Garrick ; and
the able writer of the obituary of Gainsborough in the
Morning Chronicle gives the same story, which he had
from the hps of the painter himself. " He told me,"
says this writer, *' that he never found any portrait so
difficult to hit as that of the late Mr. Garrick, for when
he was sketching in the eyebrows and thought he had
hit upon the precise situation and then looked a second
time at the model he found the eyebrows hfted up to
the middle of the forehead ; and when he looked a third
time they were dropped like a curtain, close over the eye.
So flexible and universal was the countenance of this
great player that it was as impossible to catch his hke-
ness as it is to catch the form of a passing cloud."
The other " whole length of a gentleman " in the ex-
hibition of 1766 is unidentified by Mr. Algernon Graves
in his dictionary of contributors to the Royal Academy,
but it represented Dr. Charlton, a well-known Bath
46 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
physician who will reappear later in these pages as one
of the medical men called in to prescribe for Gains-
borough's daughter Margaret. Thicknesse, in his book
of Characters, pubhshed in 1770, refers to this portrait.
In a hst of people whose past misdeeds he is raking up
he says that Dr. C— rl— on ought to have been ashamed of
himself " when he employed Mr. Gainsborough to enable
him to exhibit his full length Portrait in the exhibition
room at Spring Gardens." This can only refer to the
exhibition of 1766, as all the full lengths shown at Spring
Gardens in other years have been identified. Ozias
Humphry, R.A., who was Hving at Bath, and on very
intimate terms with Gainsborough, when Dr. Charlton's
portrait was painted, describes it as a work of singular
power. " It was a walking figure in a familiar dress,
and absolutely seemed, when first entering the room,
like a living person."
This exhibition at Spring Gardens was the subject
of a descriptive pamphlet in verse, entitled, A Candid
Display of the Genius and Merits of the several Masters
whose works are now offered to the Public at Spring Gardens.
By an Impartial Hand. It was sold at the exhibition
rooms at a shilling a copy. The critic's reference to
Gainsborough, who is bracketed with Reynolds, is slight
but flattering :
" There Gainsborough shines, much honoured name,
There veteran Reynolds, worthy of his fame."
The reference to a veteran could not have been pleasing
to Reynolds, v/ho was at this time only forty-three years
old and still a long way from his zenith.
To the " Impartial Hand," responsible for the
pamphlet, the works of art that appealed most were the
productions of William Peters, who afterwards wound
up a career, in the course of which he painted many
pictures of questionable taste, by taking orders and
accepting the chaplaincy of the Royal Academy, of
which institution he had previously become a member.
BATH, 1760-1766 47
Although Reynolds and Gainsborough, the stars of the
exhibition of 1766, are allowed by the " Impartial Hand "
only a couplet between them, Peters is praised effusively
in twenty Hues of verse.
Among Gainsborough's Bath friends at this time was
the Rev. Richard Graves, the author of The Spiritual
Quixote, who in some lines written in 1766 shows that the
artist had brought into temporary fashion the practice
of painting lovers amid rustic or garden surroundings.
Graves, whose lines are addressed to "A Limner at
Bath : Equally excellent in Portraits and landscapes,"
indulges in a rhapsody about the " crystal founts and
amaranthine bowers " of the Garden of Eden, and com-
pares Gainsborough's pictured lovers with Adam and
Eve :
" Like that bless'd pair, by G— nsb— gh's pencil drawn,
Here each fond couple treads the flow'ry lawn."
He explains in a footnote that Gainsborough has painted
" several ladies and gentlemen drawn in that taste."
CHAPTER III
BATH, I767-I768
Gainsborough removes to The Circus — Smollett on The Circus — Joshua
Kirby and George the Third — Exhibition of supposed picture by
the King — An artistic sensation — Gainsborough and a minor poet —
The poet's resentment and sarcastic verses — A duel suggested —
William Jackson of Exeter introduced to Gainsborough by Collins
— Jackson on Gainsborough's music — Gainsborough's letters to him
— Drawing paper — Letter to the Duke of Bedford — Letter to Gar-
rick about Shakespeare — Gainsborough's correspondence — Unfair
criticism by Theodore Hook — Singing at first sight.
The Circus, to which Gainsborough removed about
Christmas 1766, was designed by John Wood, the archi-
tect to whose taste and skill Bath owes some of its finest
and most characteristic features. It is composed of
thirty large houses of Bath stone built in a circle, and
adorned with columns on the ground, first, and second
floors. Gainsborough's new house, like the one he had
recently left in Lansdowne Road, was on the high ground
to the north of the city, and some distance from the baths
and places of entertainment, which at that time were all
grouped together in the older and lower part of the town.
It is curious that a fashionable portrait-painter like
Gainsborough should have chosen to settle so far from
the locality whence he drew most of his patronage, and
where the gay crowd that thronged Bath from October
to April spent most of its idle hours. Not only was The
Circus some distance from the centre of things in Bath
but the means of access to it were far from good.
In Humphry Clinker, Smollett describes carefully the
Bath of Gainsborough's day, and he makes Matthew
Bramble speak of The Circus as most inconveniently
situated. " The only entrance to it," he says, " through
48
BATH, 1767-1768 49
Gay Street, is so difficult, steep, and slippery, that in wet
weather it must be exceedingly dangerous both for those
who ride in carriages and those who walk on foot, and
when the street is covered with snow I don't see how
any individual can go up or down without the most
imminent danger of broken bones." Smollett had him-
self witnessed the difficulties of approaching The Circus
in bad weather, as he lodged in Gay Street when he spent
the winter of 1766 in Bath. The position of Gains-
borough's house was the more unfortunate because the
principal season at Bath was in the winter, and most of
his sitters had to chmb, or be carried, up a steep hill
over roads that were notoriously bad at a time when
no English roads were good. Beattie, when he visited
Bath some years later and paid the city the highest
compliment in the power of a Scotsman by comparing it
with Edinburgh, had nothing good to say about its roads.
" The soil," said Beattie, " is white chalk, which on the
surface of the ground is pounded by the feet of animals
and the wheels of carriages into fine powder, which in
dry weather is continually flying about ; in wet weather
it covers all the streets with a deep mire."
On the other hand, Gainsborough found some patron-
age in the new neighbourhood in which he had fixed his
dwelling-place, for The Circus, although in the suburbs,
was already fashionable. Clive took a house there after
his return from India ; the elder Pitt, who was member
of Parliament for Bath for some years before he entered
the Upper House as Lord Chatham, lived at what is now
known as No, 7 ; and the fourth Duke of Bedford, who
resided in Bath in the hope that his health might be
restored by the waters, occupied, as I have already
stated, one of the two central mansions in the northern
block of The Circus. One of the several houses in The
Circus which have been assigned by tradition to Gains-
borough adjoins that formerly tenanted by the Duke^
and it is therefore possible that his Grace and the painter
50 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
were next-door neighbours. If this were so, it might
account for the famiHar fashion of Gainsborough's letter
to the Duke of Bedford in 1768, sohciting his interest on
behalf of the composer William Jackson of Exeter, and
written, as the artist admits, with " monstrous freedom."
The houses in The Circus, though large, do not seem
well adapted for the residence of a portrait -painter who
wished to use one of the rooms as a studio. At No. 24,
the house now adorned, I think erroneously, with the
Gainsborough tablet, the only possible apartment for
this purpose is the front room on the first floor, which is
lighted by three windows of no great size. The back of
the house is useless, as it faces south-east and has the sun
on its windows all the morning. It is a strange thing
that of all Gainsborough's sitters or friends not one tells
us anything of consequence about the situation or ar-
rangement of his studio, except that it was dimly lighted.
J. T. Smith, in his life of Nollekens the sculptor, speaks
of visits to the house in Pall Mall, but unfortunately says
little about the painting room in which as a boy he saw
Gainsborough at work, and no visitor to the Bath studio
has been any more communicative. It has been sug-
gested that Gainsborough may have lived at The Circus
and painted his portraits in a studio nearer to the centre
of Bath, but this does not agree with the definite state-
ment of Thicknesse. He says that when he called one
morning at the painter's house, accompanied by Mrs.
Thicknesse, " Mr. Gainsborough invited her up into his
picture room, saying, ' Madame, I have something to
show you.' "
From his new studio Gainsborough sent four pictures
to the exhibition held in Spring Gardens in April and May,
1767. These were full lengths of Lady Grosvenor, the
Duke of Argyll, and Mr. Vernon ; and a Landskip and
Figures, in which Walpole found something to admire.
" The landscape," he said, " is very rich, the group of
figures delightfully managed, and the horses well drawn ;
BATH, 1767-1768 51
the distant hill is one tint too dark." These pictures did
not attract much attention from the newspaper critics,
and the only reference I have found to them is a brief
mention in the Universal Museum, " Gainsborough has
various merits, but is unequal."
But if Gainsborough's work at Spring Gardens in 1767
made no great stir, a picture in the same exhibition by
his Ipswich friend Joshua Kirby was for a time the talk
of the town, though not because of its merits. A story
was in circulation (and does not seem to have been
contradicted) that the King was the real author of one
of the landscapes exhibited by Kirby, who was in close
touch with, and constantly employed by the Court. " It
is assured," declared a writer in the London Chronicle,
" that a picture in the exhibition of paintings at Spring
Gardens is the sole production of a very great personage,
and introduced into the catalogue under a feigned name."
The suspected picture was An Evening View of Kew Ferry,
exhibited by Joshua Kirby, whose house at Kew adjoined
the Ferry steps.
We now come to an incident in the life of Gains-
borough which is not mentioned by any of his biographers.
It is a quarrel between the painter and a minor poet,
which although ridiculous in its commencement, in the
end brought the two men to the verge of a hostile meeting.
In the spring of 1767, soon after Gainsborough had re-
moved to The Circus, the visitors to Bath included a young
man named Underwood. He had recently left Cam-
bridge, and was now, in the intervals of ample leisure,
following in a half-amateur fashion the pursuit of htera-
ture. Underwood, who had many acquaintances among
the writers and actors of the day, possessed a rhyming
faculty that made easy to him the composition of medi-
ocre verse. At Bath he was introduced to Gainsborough,
with whom he became on such friendly terms that the
artist offered to paint his portrait at full length without any
charge, and send it to the exhibition at Spring Gardens.
52 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
This, at least, was how the poet understood the offer,
but the sequel shows that Gainsborough, if he said any-
thing about painting a portrait, did not intend that his
promise should be taken seriously. The story is told by
Underwood in a small volume of verse printed by sub-
scription in 1768 at Bath, where its pubhcation was the
cause of some amusement to the residents and visitors,
and much annoyance to Gainsborough.
Garrick, Foote, George Colman, Dr. Schomberg, and
Derrick, the Master of the Ceremonies at Bath, were all
numbered among the subscribers to Underwood's volume
of Satyric Poems, Epigrams, Poetic Epistles, &c., of several
of which Gainsborough is the object. The first verses
that concern the artist are in the form of " A Poetic
Epistle, Address'd to Mr. Gainsborough, Painter at Bath,
in which the author reminds him of his promise made in
April last to present him with a whole-length picture."
This letter, which is couched in the most friendly terms,
was written in September, 1767. It commences thus :
" Presuming upon Friendship shown,
In April last at Bath when down.
I should ere now addressed a letter
(Perhaps like this for want of better),
And begged to be indulged the reason
You came not up in May's fair season?"
Underwood goes on to explain that he has not wTitten
earlier on account of a severe illness, but that he has
now recovered completely and ventures to recall Gains-
borough's offer, and to advise him that he hopes soon
to call upon him at Bath.
" A fortnight from this date I mean
To quit this busy, bustling scene.
I mean to pass the Severn tide
And visit friend on other side,
And if your leisure time permit,
For season scarce commences yet.
■ BATH, 1767-1768 53
I should be proud of your display,
For Bath, of course, is in my way.
But if the times are pressing still
And shoals demand your wondrous skill,
Contented till a future day
Your jingling scribbler, U., must stay."
But Gainsborough, who was almost fooHshly generous in
giving away pictures, and painting his friends for nothing,
disclaimed all intention of offering sittings to the poet,
and told Underwood so in plain words when he made his
appearance at The Circus, Under\vood, in a scornful
footnote to the reprint of the first, and friendly letter,
from which I have given extracts, reminds Gainsborough
of his alleged discourtesy. " The Author takes this
opportunity to thank the Gentleman for his strict attention
to his promise, and the very genteel ingenuous reception
he has since met wth from him, and at the same time
assures him that he is preparing with all convenient dis-
patch the public retort which he has already privately
engaged to treat him with." After the rupture Under-
wood went for a time to Wales. He returned to Bath
in October, and spent two months there worrying all his
friends and acquaintances to subscribe to his book, and
quarrelHng with the editors of the local papers because
they would not accept his contributions. A letter in
verse sent by Underwood in the autumn to a friend in
London refers again to the dispute :
" A piece of news for private ear —
No matter — shortly will appear
As public as a press can make it,
And therefore let the winds all take it.
Gainsbro,' an artist in this place,
I told you was to draw my face,
And gratis promised to supply
A picture for the Public Eye.
Apostate-y\^e. denies his word,
In fine has acted so absurd
And treated me with such neglect,
Though I've behaved with all respect
54 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
That I've engaged — am in advance,
To treat him with Satyric Dance.
In manner on Churchillian Plan
I'll lash \\i^ petty Gentleman^
A second Hogarth to your view
When maul'd in my corroding stew
His usage he shall quickly rue."
An attempt to reconcile the disputants was made by
Simon Pine, the miniature painter, who hved at Bath ;
but it was unsuccessful, and Pine himself became the
object of the poet's spiteful attacks. Underwood re-
minds Pine of Gay's warning of the fate of those who
interfere in quarrels, and adds :
" But little did I think, friend P . . e
(You see I've hitched you in a line),
Would so forget himself and Bard
For whom he had preferred regard
As to neglect this golden rule
And thus display the meddling Fool.
Impertitient, officious, wrong
(Much better had he held his tongue),
For let your Brother Artist know
Since 'tis himself that nerves my bow
The promised shaft ere long shall wing,
For you've but doubly braced the string ;
In the meantime his dapper squire,
Composed of true Pacific Fire,
May fetch and carry, bluster, swear —
But all in vain — he hectors air."
Underwood, in a brief passage in prose that follows
this rhymed invective, says : " This worthy Confidant
was so nettled at the Author's retort determination that
he declared he would bring any message whatever from
Mr. Gainsborough." The poet follows an advertisement
of his book in the St. James's Chronicle by an announce-
ment that " shortly will be published by the same Author
' An epistle to Thomas Gainsborough, Painter, Bath,' "
but I have not succeeded in tracing any record of its
appearance. Gainsborough's comment on the affair is
to be found in a postscript to an undated letter to Garrick
BATH, 1767-1768 55
— ^the one in which he protests that he will allow no one
but himself to present a portrait of the actor to their
common friend Clutterbuck. The postscript is short
but to the point, " Damn Underwood ! "
Gainsborough, in Underwood's first letter, is asked by
the poet why he failed to come up to town " in May's
fair season," and the way in which the question is put
seems to suggest that it may have been the custom of
the artist to visit London in the early summer, when
sitters at Bath were probably few and far between. In
that case it is not unlikely that he executed commissions
in town long before he settled in Pall Mall in 1774.
There is a hint of this in a letter to the Earl of Dart-
mouth, quoted in a later chapter, in which Gainsborough
offers to repaint a portrait of Lady Dartmouth, " when
1 can be in London for that purpose."
One of the poems in Underwood's little volume is
addressed to William Jackson of Exeter, " on hearing the
Lycidas of Milton performed at Bath under his direction,
and the music of his own composing, at Gyde's Room,
November, 1767." It was an occasion upon which
Gainsborough was sure to be present, for the performers
included his friend Giardini, the viohnist, whom he had
known at Ipswich ; and the Linley family, father, son,
and daughter, the last that incomparable singer and
beautiful woman who figures on some of Gainsborough's
finest canvases. The conductor of the Bath concert was
the composer of the well-known Te Deum, with whom
Gainsborough had recently commenced the intimacy that
only ended with the painter's death more than twenty
years afterwards. The sympathy between the men
was twofold, for just as Gainsborough adored music,
Jackson loved to handle the brush, and even exhibited
at the Royal Academy.
WiUiam Jackson when a young man made the ac-
quaintance of a miniature painter named Collins, who
came to Exeter just at the time when the musician was
56 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
endeavouring, with small success, to add drawing and
painting to his other accomplishments. " Collins pos-
sessed," says Jackson, " a great command of the black
lead pencil, and a happy talent for making washed draw-
ings of groups of figures in the humorous style. He
saw that I was wrong, and was always saying it, but he
never informed me how to be right. By his means I
became acquainted with Gainsborough." The minia-
ture painter who introduced Jackson to Gainsborough
was probably Samuel Collins, who practised for some years
at Bath. Collins, who was the master of Ozias Hum-
phry, R.A., appears to have been on intimate terms with
Gainsborough, who painted his portrait and gave him a
drawing of a landscape that is now in the British Museum.
Jackson's opinion of his own brushwork does not
appear to have agreed with that of his artist friends,
and it has been said that this inappreciation was a sore
point in his relations with Gainsborough, and the cause
of his disparaging remarks, made in after years, on the
painter's accomphshment in music. Jackson began to
paint in oils when he was twenty-seven, but made slow
progress. He speaks of his earher pictures as not de-
ficient in design and colour, but ill-painted, as he was
perfectly ignorant of the mechanical part of the pro-
fession. " Nor," says he, " did I ever receive a hint from
any artist of my acquaintance how to correct my touch."
Even his friend Gainsborough gave him no help, although
Jackson presented the painter with a picture from his
own hand. Jackson says that this picture of his was
among those disposed of in the sale at Gainsborough's
house after his death, and adds with much satisfaction
that " it occasioned many guesses at the painter." Al-
though the musician complains of his neglect by artists
some of them were always numbered among his friends,
and in the course of his long life he sat to Gainsborough,
Keenan, Ozias Humphry, Morland, and Opie. He does
not appear to have been painted by Sir Joshua, although
BATH, 1767-1768 57
he knew him well (Fanny Bumey mentions meeting Jack-
son at the President's house), and left among some auto-
biographical notes an interesting comparison of the
opinions on landscape of Re3.'nolds and Gainsborough.
Jackson says : " Sir Joshua always considered Claude
as the Raffaele of landscape painting, but Claude was
no favourite with Gainsborough. He thought his pencil-
ling tame and insipid."
Wilham Jackson's grotesque account of Gainsbo-
rough's supposed adventures with musicians — the Welsh
harper, Professor Straub the theorbo player, and
many others, has been quoted frequently and largely
in most of the painter's biographies. I do not repeat
these spiteful and too famihar stories, because there is
good reason to beheve that they give an inaccurate and
most unfair description of Gainsborough's musical know-
ledge. Further comments on this subject and on Gains-
borough as a musician are to be found in the chapter of
Notes and Anecdotes. Gainsborough makes many refer-
ences to music in the twelve letters to Jackson, full of
banter and gossip, that are now the property of the
Royal Academy. On the cover of one of them William
Jackson has written, " This parcel of letters are kept
for my brother, Thomas Jackson, if ever he returns to
England, but if not during my life, they should be de-
stroyed." Thomas Jackson, who was in the diplomatic
service, and was at one time British Minister to Turin,
received the letters, which afterwards came into the
possession of one of his great nieces, by whom they were
sold to the Royal Academy about thirty years ago. Two
or three of them have been mutilated at some earlier
period. Portions at the ends of the sheets have been
torn off, perhaps for the sake of the signatures.
Gainsborough says little about his painting in his
correspondence with Jackson, whom he^thanks sometimes
for helping him with his musical studies, but he mentions
in 1768 that he is beginning the portraits of Tom Linley
58 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
and his sister — aftenvards Mrs, Sheridan. In other
letters he teases Jackson about a supposed fall when
riding, thanks him for a present of indigo, offers him a
bed whenever he may be in Bath, and recommends him,
if music does not satisfy him, to try drapery painting for
artists, an occupation at which money could be made.
But interesting as they are the letters do not throw
much light on Gainsborough's hfe, and their biographical
usefulness is further discounted by the fact that few of
them bear dates. Nevertheless, they are of great value
for their revelations concerning Gainsborough's tastes and
feelings, for to the Exeter musician the painter seems
to have expressed his thoughts unreservedly. They are
all given in the Appendix, but with slight expurgations,
for Gainsborough's intimate letters sometimes contain
coarse expressions. This, perhaps, is why so few have
been preserved. The letters, for example, written to
Samuel Kilderbee, " brilliant but eccentric, and too
licentious to be published," have long been lost sight of,
and were probably destroyed by Kilderbee's heirs. In the
Jackson letters, fortunately, coarse touches are infrequent.
A letter wTitten by Gainsborough at the end of
November, 1767, shows that in searching for a paper
suitable for v/ash drawings his attention had been called
to Anstey's New Bath Guide, then in the full tide of popu-
larity. It seemed to Gainsborough that the paper on
which Anstey's verses were printed was eminently suit-
able for water-colour, and he wrote for some of it to
Dodsley, of Pall ]\Iall, the London publisher of the New
Bath Guide. He obtained what he wanted, but was yet
disappointed, as his letter of acknowledgment shows,
by the unexpected wire-marks in the paper.
To J as. Dodsley, Pall Mall, London.
Bath, 26th November, 1767.
Sir, — I beg you to accept my sincerest thanks for the
favour you have done me concerning the paper for draw-
BATH, 1767-1768 59
ings. I had set my heart upon getting some of it, as it
is so completely what I have long been in search of. The
mischief of that you were so kind as to enclose is not only
the small ^^^res but a large cross wire . . . which the other
has none of, nor hardly any impression of the smallest
wire. I ^\^sh, Sir, that one of my landskips, such as I
could make you upon that paper, would prove a sufft-
cient inducement for you to make still further inquiry.
I should think my time well bestowed, however little
the value you might with reason set upon it. — I am. Sir,
your much obhged and most obedient humble servant,
Tho. Gainsborough.
PS. — I am at this moment \dewing the difference of
that you sent and the Bath guide, holding them edge-
ways to the hght, and could cry my eyes out to see those
furrows. Upon my honour I would give a guinea a
quire for a dozen quire of it.
In 1768 the newspapers paid little attention to the
fine arts, and I have found no mention in any journal
of Gainsborough's full-length portraits of Captain
Needham and Captain Her\'ey, which he sent to Spring
Gardens ; or to another portrait shown in the autumn
at a special exhibition held in honour of the King of
Denmark's visit to London. Captain Hervey's portrait
was seen recently at Burlington House, where it was
catalogued as Augustus John, third Earl of Bristol, to
which title the captain succeeded in 1775. The portraits
of the two captains were the last works shown by Gains-
borough at the Society of Artists. After 1768 all the
pictures exhibited by him pubhcly in London were sent
to the Royal Academy, with the exception of a portrait
and two landscapes contributed to the gallery of the
Free Society of Artists.
Certain passages in Gainsborough's letters to Jackson
show that in the earher years of their acquaintance the
musician was uneasy about his present position, and far
from happy about his future prospects. It was in this
connection that Gainsborough suggested that if music
6o THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
failed his friend might find remunerative occupation as
a drapery painter. But Jackson wanted what he called
" a certainty," in other words, a place, and Gainsborough,
whose portrait-painting had brought him into close
contact with some great people, endeavoured to obtain
for the musician a post under Government that would
always ensure him a competence. Jackson went to
London in the spring of 1768 to apply for a receivership
of taxes, and invited Gainsborough to come to town for
a few days as his guest. Gainsborough wrote on the nth
of May regretting that the picture of the Linleys upon
which he was engaged would prevent him from leaving
Bath ; but, apparently in answer to an urgent appeal
of Jackson's, he sent on the 29th the following letter to
the Duke of Bedford, who, as I have already stated,
was his neighbour in The Circus.
"Bath, May 2gih, 1768.
" My Lord Duke, — A most worthy honest man, and
one of the greatest geniuses for musical compositions
England ever produced, is now in London, and has got
two or three Members of Parliament along with him out
of Devonshire, to make application for one of the receivers
of the land-tax of that county, now resigned by a very
old man, one Mr. Haddy. His name is William Jackson ;
lives at Exeter ; and for his plainness, truth, and ingenuity,
at the same time, is beloved as no man ever was.
" Your Grace has doubtless heard his compositions,
but he is no fiddler, your Grace may take my word for it ;
he is extremely clever and good, is a married man with a
young family, and is qualified over and over again for
the place ; has got friends of fortune who will be bound
for him in any sum ; and they are all making application
to his Grace the Duke of Grafton to get him this place.
But, my Lord Duke, I told him they could not do it with-
out me ; that I must write to your Grace about it. He
is at Mr. Arnold's, in Norfolk Street, in the Strand ;
and if your Grace would be pleased to think of it I should
be ever bound to pray for your Grace. Your Grace
knows that I am an original, and therefore I hope will
be the more ready to pardon this monstrous freedom."
BATH, 1767-1768 61
Gainsborough's letter may have been too free for the
Duke, for Jackson did not get the receivership, but
gained instead distinction as a composer, and doubtless
a sufficient income.
At this time Gainsborough was at work for Garrick
upon a picture of Shakespeare which probably was never
finished. The nature of the commission and the refer-
ence to Stratford in one of Gainsborough's letters have
led Fulcher and other writers to conclude that the
picture in progress was intended for the Shakespeare
Jubilee of 1769. This, however, could not have been the
case, as I shall show in the next chapter, in the notes
on the festival at Stratford-on-Avon. Gainsborough
writes to Garrick in 1768 :
" Dear Sir, — I take particular notice of your friendly
anxiety for my recovery. I do assure you, and thank you
most kindly for your sharp thought, but having had
12 oz. of blood taken immediately away, am perfectly
recovered, strong in the back and able, so make your
sublime self easy — I suppose your letter to Mr. Sharp
was upon no other business, so have enclosed it — but,
observe, I thank you sincerely.
' ' Shakespeare shall come forth forthwith, as the lawyer
says. Damn the original picture of him, with your leave,
for I think a stupider face, I never beheld, except D k's.
" I intend, with your approbation, my dear friend,
to take the form from his pictures and statues just enough
to preserve his likeness past the doubt of all blockheads at
first sight, and supply a soul from his works — it is impos-
sible that such a mind and ray of heaven could shine
with such a face and pair of eyes as that picture has ;
so as I said before, damn that.
" I'm going to dinner, and after I'll try a sketch —
I shall leave the price to you — I don't care whether I
have a farthing if you will but let me do it — ^to be sure I
should never ask you more than my portrait price (which
is sixty guineas), but perhaps ought to ask less, as there
is no confinement of painting from hfe ; but I say I leave
it to you, promising to be contented upon honour. I
could wish you to call, upon any pretence, any day after
next Wednesday at the Duke of Montagu, because you'd
62 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
see the Duke and Duchess in my last manner ; but not
as if you thought anything of mine worth that trouble,
only to see his Grace's landskip of Rubens, and the four
Vandykes, whole length, in his Grace's dressing-room."
There is no date on this letter, except in an endorse-
ment in Garrick's hand, " A letter from Gainsborough
about Shakespeare and my picture, 1768," but it seems
to have been written in the summer, some weeks before
another letter, in which the painter reports the unsatis-
factory progress of his work. But before quoting this
second letter it is necessary to say something about the
gross unfairness with which it has been treated by
Theodore Hook, who contributed the notes to Garrick's
Correspondence. To the garbled version in the Corre-
spondence of Gainsborough's letter of August 22, 1768,
Hook appends a footnote : " It is a pity that such a genius
as Gainsborough should have dishonoured himself and
sullied pure white paper with such profane filth." Nothing
could be couched in stronger terms of reprobation than
this note of Hook's, which is probably responsible for
the prevailing impression that Gainsborough's corre-
spondence with his intimates was full of impropriety.
There are occasional touches of coarseness, as I pointed
out in speaking of the Jackson letters, but nothing that
can in any degree justify Hook's astonishing note, which
suggests suppressed passages full of Rabelaisian images.
I have copied the letter to which Hook takes exception,
exactly to a comma from the original in Gainsborough's
own hand, and now give it in its unexpurgated form.
It will not shock any reader who remembers that it was
written in the eighteenth century, when oaths were
commonly used in conversation.
" Dear Sir, — I doubt I shall stand accused (if not
accursed) all this time of my neglect of not going to
Stratford, and giving you a line from thence as I promised ;
but Lord, what can one do such weather as this — continual
rains ; My genius is so dampt by it that I can do nothing
to please me. I have been several days rubbing in &
BATH, 1767-1768 63
rubbing out my design for Shakespeare, & damme if
I think I shall let it go, or let you see it at last — I was
willing like an ass as I am, to expose myself a little, out
of the simple Portrait way, & had a notion of showing
where that inimitable Poet had his Ideas from, by an
immediate Ray darting down upon his Eye turn'd up
for that purpose ; but G. . damn it, I can make nothing
of my Ideas there has been such a fall of rain from the
same quarter — you shall not see it for I'll cut it out
before you can come — ^tell me, Dear Sir, when you pur-
pose coming to Bath, that I may be quick enough in my
Motions. Shakespeare's Bust is a silly smiling thing,
& I have not sense enough to make him more sensible
in the Picture and so I tell ye, you shan't see it. I must
make a plain Picture of him standing erect, and give it
an old look as if it had been painted at the time he lived
& there we shall fling 'em damme.
" Poor Mrs. Pritchard died here on Saturday night
II o'clock — so now her performance being no longer present
to those who must see and hear, before they can believe,
will you know my dear sir — ^but I beg pardon, I forgot —
Time puts us all into his Fobb, as I do my timekeeper,
watch that my Dear. — Who am I but the same think you
"T. G.
" Impudent scoundrel says Mr. G. — Blackguard.
"Bath, 22nd August, 1768."
An unintentionally amusing comment on this letter
is to be found in one of the modern biographies of Garrick.
The writer, who evidently had seen Theodore Hook's
note, but not the original letter, speaks of Gainsborough's
supposed coarseness, and reads his playful postscript as
a reproach of Garrick's. He quotes a portion of the letter
and prints in a footnote, " ' Impudent scoundrel,' adds Mr.
Garrick." Mrs. Pritchard, whose death at Bath is an-
nounced in this letter, was the actress of whom Charles
Dibdin wrote, " She was everywhere great, everywhere
impressive, and everywhere feminine."
There is another letter written by Gainsborough to
Garrick in the same summer, and referring to some work
64 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
executed by the painter for which he refuses to accept
any further remuneration. Garrick seems to have en-
deavoured to force payment upon his friend for " this
shabby performance " (as Gainsborough calls it), the
nature of which is not stated. Writing from Bath on
July 27, 1768, Gainsborough says, after reproving the
actor for his " romantic whimsies " : "I thought you
knew me too well, you who can read hearts and faces
both at a view, and that at first sight too. Come, if you
will not plague me any more on this frightful subject,
I will tell you a story about first sight. You must know,
Sir, whilst I lived at Ipswich, there was a benefit concert
at which a new song was to be introduced, and I being
steward, went to the honest cabinet-maker who was our
singer, instead of a better, and asked him if he could sing
at sight, for that I had a new song with all the parts wnrote
out. ' Yes, Sir,' said he, ' I can.' Upon which I ordered
Mr. Giardini of Ipswich to begin the symphony, and
gave my signal for the attention of the company ; but
behold a dead silence followed the symphony instead
of the song. Upon which I jumped up to the fellow :
' D — n you, why don't you sing ? Did you not say
you could sing at sight ? ' ' Yes, please your honour,
I did say I could sing at sight, but not first sight.' "
To this anecdote there is a singularly exact parallel
in the memoirs of Dr. Bumey, the historian of music and
the father of Fanny Bumey. Bumey says that he re-
members Handel being detained at Chester on his way
to Ireland in 1741. The wind was adverse, and as the
composer had to stay some days in the city he determined
to practise one of his choruses in the Messiah, and engaged
an amateur, a printer named Janson, to sing for him.
Janson tried and broke down. Handel was furious.
" You scoundrel, did you not tell me you could sing at
sight ? " " Yes, Sir," said the printer, " and so I can,
but not at first sight." It is evidently the same story,
but to whom does it belong ?
CHAPTER IV
BATH, I769-I77I
Foundation of the Royal Academy — Gainsborough an original member
— The Shakespeare Festival at Stratford — Gainsborough's portrait
of David Garrick in the Town Hall — The Blue Boy — Sir
Sampson Gideon and the bank-note — A "character" of Gains-
borough in 1770 — On likeness in portraiture — Letters from Gains-
borough to Lord Dartmouth — Fancy dress and portraits — Opinions
of Gainsborough and Sir Joshua compared — Captain Wade's
portrait— The reason for its altered background — Illness of
Margaret Gainsborough — Dr. Moysey's dreadful verdict — A change
of doctors — Accident at the New Rooms — The falling chandelier —
Narrow escape of Gainsborough — Dr. Schomberg's portrait —
Curious parallel — Gainsborough's " unbounded liberahty,"
In the spring of 1769 was held the first Exhibition of the
Royal Academy, which had been brought into existence
by the signing of the " Instrument " by George the Third
on the loth of December 1768. The original members
of the Royal Academy were chiefly men who had belonged
to the Incorporated Society of Artists and had left it
owing to the incessant dissensions in that body, which
came to a head when Gainsborough's friend Joshua
Kirby, the Ipswich house-painter, was elected to the
Presidentship. Kirby was an honest and able man of
business, but as an artist not worth considering, and as
the seceders from his society included all its best painters,
sculptors, and architects, he was unable to make any
stand against the newly founded Royal Academy, led by
Joshua Reynolds and financed by the King.
Sir Joshua in his notebook for 1768 mentions writing
to Gainsborough at the end of November, and this letter
no doubt contained an invitation to the Bath painter
to join the new institution. Gainsborough, as we know,
made a favourable response, and became one of the
thirty-six original members of the Royal Academy, whose
65 E
66 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
exhibition of 1769 was opened in April in Pall Mall.
Gainsborough sent to it a landscape ; and portraits of
Lady Molyneux, of a boy who has not been identified,
and of George Pitt, the eldest son of Lord Rivers. He did
not, however, present a picture to the Royal Academy
upon his nomination to membership, as Fulcher and
some other biographers have supposed. The Romantic
Landscape with Sheep at a Fountain by Gainsborough,
now in the Diploma Gallery, was presented to the Royal
Academy by the painter's daughter Margaret in 1799.
The contemporary notices of the first Academy Ex-
hibition are very scanty, but the 5/. James's Chronicle
praises Gainsborough's portrait of Lady Molyneux, and
mentions it as one of the few pictures to which connois-
seurs might profitably direct their attention.
Gainsborough was connected with the great festival
in honour of Shakespeare held at Stratford-on-Avon in the
autumn of 1769. A new Town Hall had just been built
at Stratford, and to adorn it the Corporation appealed
to Garrick for "a statue, bust, or portrait of Shakes-
peare," and if possible a portrait of himself. The letter
asking for these gifts is in a collection of papers relating
to the festival, formed by George Daniel, who owned the
small copy of Gainsborough's Stratford portrait of Gar-
rick which formerly hung in the dining-room of the actor's
house in the Adelphi ; and who bequeathed to the British
Museum the famous carved casket of mulberry wood pre-
sented to Garrick by the Stratford Corporation. The
letter, endorsed by Garrick, " The Steward of Stratford's
letter to me which produced the Jubilee," is dated De-
cember 6th, 1768, and it is therefore clear that the picture
of Shakespeare referred to in Gainsborough's letters written
in the summer of that year could not have been intended
for the festival. Garrick presented the Corporation with
a statue of Shakespeare and a picture of him painted by
Wilson. He also undertook the direction of the Jubilee
festivities which, in September 1769, attracted an extra-
DAVID GARRICK
Copyright, the Corporation of Stratford-on-Avon
BATH, 1769-1771 67
ordinary crowd of visitors to Stratford, whose innkeepers
and inhabitants generally reaped a rich harvest. Foote,
who was charged nine guineas for a bed, declared that a
man of whom he asked the time actually demanded a fee
of two shillings for the information !
According to local tradition Garrick presented to
Stratford-on-Avon the well-known portrait of himself
by Gainsborough, as well as the statue and picture. The
portrait shows the actor, with his arm round a bust of
Shakespeare, standing in a landscape that Fulcher de-
scribes as a view in Garrick's grounds at Hampton.
Walpole, probably better informed, says that it repre-
sents Prior Park, Ralph Allen's seat near Bath. When
the portrait was lent by the Corporation to the Royal
Academy in 1876, and to the Grosvenor Gallery in 1885,
it was described on both occasions as the gift of Garrick.
Fulcher believed this to be the case, but I have found
proof that Garrick's portrait was a commission from the
Corporation, and a copy of Gainsborough's receipt for
the payment for it is among the Daniel papers.
" Received of the Corporation of Stratford-on-Avon, by the hands
of David Garrick, Esq., sixty-three pounds in full for a whole-length
portrait of that gentleman.
r(^ Thomas Gainsborough."
The following is a copy of the bill for the elaborately
carved frame of the portrait.
"The Corporation of Stratford to Mr. Wilson, Painter, at Great
Queen Street, London. ijth August 1769.
For a Carlo Maratti frame to the picture of David £ s. d.
Garrick, Esq 12 12 o
Ornament to ditto, burnished gold . . . . 56 2 o
Lining for the picture, to secure it from damp, &c.,
and fixing it on i 16 o
For a large case 3 12 o
Paid at the Inn for unloading ditto .... 20
llA 4 o."
68 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
A paragraph in a London newspaper of May 1769 shows
that the Corporation had already made arrangements
for providing the portrait of the actor : " We hear that
the new edifice in Stratford to be called Shakespeare's
Hall will be decorated in the most elegant manner before
the Jubilee in September next, and that the Corporation
have prevailed on Mr. Garrick to sit for his picture, which
they will put up at one end of the large room, and that
Mr. Garrick will present the town with a picture of
Shakespeare for the other end."
Some further information on this subject is given in
the Public Advertiser of May 12, 1769. Referring to
some particulars already given concerning the plans for
the forthcoming celebration, the editor of the journal
says : " In addition to our article on the respect paid
to Shakespeare and Garrick by the Corporation of
Stratford-on-Avon, we are informed that there is a very
large picture of Shakespeare in the attitude of exclaim-
ing, ' O for a Muse of Fire ' now at Mr. Wilson's in Great
Queen Street ; and another of Mr. Garrick leaning on a
bust of Shakespeare, by Mr. Gainsborough ; now copying
at Mr. Wilson's to be put up together in the great hall at
Stratford-on-Avon by order of the Corporation." " Mr.
Wilson" (who should not be confused with his contem-
porary, Richard Wilson, R.A.) is Benjamin Wilson, the
painter of the picture of Shakespeare now at Stratford,
who supplied the gilt frame for Garrick's portrait. How-
ever, three days later, it was admitted that the portrait
of Garrick for Stratford was not a copy by Wilson but an
" original picture painted by Mr. Gainsborough," and
the Public Advertiser further announced that it had been
despatched to the birthplace of Shakespeare, where a
representative of the same journal saw it some weeks
before the Jubilee and complained of the unsheltered
position in which, temporarily, it had been placed. " To
hang up Gainsborough's picture of Roscius for a sign,"
he wrote, " is not doing justice to an artist who did not
BATH, 1769-1771 69
mix his colours for the purpose of being exposed to winter
winds."
It is curious that the Stratford correspondent of the
Gentleman's Magazine also describes the Garrick as a copy
" of Gainsborough's admirable portrait," but apart from
the correction in the Public Advertiser the qualities of the
picture proclaim it to be the work of the master. But
it may be an improved replica of the portrait of 1766, and
this would account for the rumour that it was a copy.
Gainsborough, as we see by Underwood's correspondence,
sometimes visited London in the spring, the time when
the work at Wilson's house is said to have been in pro-
gress ; and the description of the portrait of Ganick
mentioned in the paragraph shows that it resembled the
one exhibited in 1766, and condemned by the newspaper
critic. It may be that this portrait did not satisfy
Gainsborough, who, seeing that the composition was
exactly what he wanted for the Jubilee picture, painted
in London a revised version for Stratford. The sittings
referred to were perhaps given by Garrick at Wilson's
studio. Fulcher and Stephens have assumed that the
portrait of 1766 was Garrick's property, painted for him,
but there seems to be nothing to show that it was ever in
the actor's possession. Gainsborough, like other artists,
sometimes painted the portraits of theatrical celebrities
for his o\Mi pleasure or with a view to selling them. It
will be seen in a later chapter that a far more famous
theatrical portrait than Garrick's (the Mrs. Siddons) was
painted by Gainsborough for sale, and that he had great
difficulty in disposing of a work which would now fetch
many thousands of pounds at Christie's.
The Academy Exhibition of 1770 contained five por-
traits by Gainsborough as weU as a landscape, and a
" Book of Drawings." One of the portraits was another
version of Garrick, described as an excellent likeness
by contemporary observers ; but the others have not
been identified, although some writers have believed
70 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
that the full length, No. 85, was the painting of which
Mary Moser wrote to Fuseli, who was then in Rome,
that Gainsborough was beyond himself " in a portrait
of a gentleman in a Vandyke habit." There is a theory
that the picture mentioned by Mary Moser was the
famous Blue Boy, but the journals of the time give no
information that might help to solve the problem of
this picture. They say very little about the exhibition,
and among the Gainsboroughs mention only the portrait
of Garrick.
A note in Anderdon's catalogue in the Library of the
Royal Academy says that No. ^^ in the exhibition of
1770, Lady and Child, represented Lady Gideon and her
daughter, but unfortunately no authority is given for the
statement. Lady Gideon was the wife of Sir Sampson
Gideon, an eminent financier of the Georgian period,
whose wealth and peculiarities made him the subject of
many anecdotes. He was a great admirer of the Prince
of Wales, and a story is told of his presiding over a large
dinner party given at the Castle Inn, Brighton, to
celebrate the birthday of his Royal Highness. Sir
Sampson, after proposing the health of the prince,
exhibited a bank note for a thousand pounds, which he
swallowed with his glass of wine to show his respect
for the toast. But, according to the wags of the
day, he was careful to take the number of the note
before thus disposing of it. Sir Sampson was afterwards
raised to the peerage as Lord Eardley, and the portrait
mentioned above was perhaps the one exhibited at the
Grosvenor Gallery in 1885 as Lady Eardley and her
Daughter.
Philip Thicknesse, in an article written in 1770, gives
an interesting glimpse of Gainsborough at this period
of his Bath career, and, incidentally, some information
about the painting of his draperies. Reynolds, it is well
known, employed drapery painters, such as Toms and
others, to execute the elaborate costumes and uniforms
BATH, 1769-1771 71
of his sitters, but Gainsborough is supposed to have
painted everything in his pictures with his own hands,
except that in his later years he received some help from
his nephew and apprentice, Gainsborough Dupont. Sir
Walter Armstrong states that he knows of costumes
of the artist's Bath period which were not painted by
himself, but Thicknesse, writing towards the end of that
period, makes it one of Gainsborough's chief virtues
that nothing but his own handiwork is to be seen in his
portraits. The following is Thicknesse's " character "
of Gainsborough, written when the painter was living at
Bath in 1770.
" Of Mr. Gainsborough
" Nature was his master, for he had none other ! He
caught his ideas with wonderful quickness and executed
them with the utmost facility, with a black lead pencil
he is equal to any of the greatest Masters of Antiquity ;
and although Landscape Painting is his natural turn ;
he has exceeded all the modem Portrait Painters, being
the only one who paints the mind (if we may be allowed
the expression) equally as strong as the countenance.
We must explain ourselves ; for instance suppose we
should ask a friend what kind of man he was speaking
of ; whom we had never seen :— and he should say, go
into the next room and there you will know by seeing his
Portrait by Gainsborough. Reynolds and other Portrait
Painters who have undoubtedly great merit, seem to us
to paint the features very exactly but to be less careful
about what we call the countenance. We never saw a
portrait by Gainsborough (if the subject was worthy
his attention) but it would enable a stranger to form
the same judgment from the person as from the Life !
and this is an excellence peculiar to this very great
artist, add to this tha.t Mr. Gainsborough not only
paints the face ; but finishes with his own hands every
part of the drapery, this, however trifling a matter it
may appear to some, is of great importance to the
picture as it is fatigue and labour to the Artist. The
72 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
other eminent painters either cannot or will not be at
that trouble.
" We have been told a noble Duke advised Mr.
Gainsborough never to raise his present price. But if
he does not think there is more efficacy in the advice of a
Duke than from an humble admirer of his art, we could
wish to hear, he raised his price, as his years increase,
that he may really feast on the merits of his perform-
ance while he hves ; he need not be told how his paintings
will be valued, when he is dead. Painting is not the only
art this extraordinary man possesses ! Music and the
sister arts dwell with him, and he knows, as well how to
act, and think, hke a gentleman, as he does to contemn
and despise those who dare to treat him in any other
light. Though we should have been glad to have seen
some mark of the R — 1 favour shown to this gentleman
yet we are spiteful enough to confess we are glad he was
bom on this side of the Tweed."
Thicknesse's remark about the Tweed is a reflection of
the temporary unpopularity of the Scotsman in England
prevalent in 1770, owing to the supposed evil influence
exercised by Lord Bute on the mind of George the Third.
An instance of the strong feeling against Scotsmen at the
time is to be found in the reply of Allan Ramsay, painter
to the King, when he was offered a knighthood the year
before Thicknesse published the above article on Gains-
borough. Ramsay refused the knighthood, saying " that
by the country he came from he had enemies enough
already, and by this title should get more." Yet Ramsay
was well hked personally in London, where he moved in
the same distinguished society as Reynolds ; and even
Johnson, no friend to the Scot at large, lamented the death
of " dear Allan," which preceded by a few weeks only
that of the Doctor himself.
Some interesting letters written by Gainsborough at
this time are to be found in the reports of the Historical
Manuscripts Commission. The letters, which I have
already mentioned in an earlier chapter, are addressed
to the second Earl of Dartmouth, and were written to
BATH, 1 769-1 771 73
excuse and explain the artist's supposed failure to obtain
a likeness in the portrait of Lady Dartmouth which he
had recently painted, and for which the Earl had paid
him sixty guineas. In portraiture likeness was the
quality upon which Gainsborough prided himself before
everything ; and with some justice, for complaints upon
this score appear to have been rare, although there is a
letter in existence, addressed to him, in which it is stated
that the portraits of Lord and Lady Douglas were so bad
that the Duke of Queensberry refused to pay for them.
Gainsborough was far happier in catching a likeness
than was Sir Joshua, of whom Hoppner said that it sur-
prised him that the President could venture to send
home some of his portraits, so little resemblance did they
bear to the originals. The first of the letters is in reply
to one written by Lord Dartmouth, evidently complain-
ing about the portrait, which is still in the possession of
the family, and notifying that it is to be returned to
Gainsborough for alteration. Gainsborough writes from
Bath on April 8, 1771 :
" I received the honour of your Lordship's letter
acquainting me that I am to expect Lady Dartmouth's
picture at Bath, but it is not yet arrived. I shall be
extremely willing to make any alterations your Lordship
shall require when her ladyship comes to Bath for that
purpose, as I cannot (without taking away the hkeness)
touch it, unless from the life. I would not be thought,
by what I am going to observe, that I am at all unwilling
to do anything your Lordship requires to it, or even to
paint an entire new picture for the money I received for
that, as I shall always take pleasure in doing anything
for Lord Dartmouth, but I should fancy myself a great
blockhead if I was capable of painting such a hkeness
as I did of your Lordship and not have sense enough to
see why I did not give the same satisfaction in Lady
Dartmouth's picture ; and I beheve your Lordship will
agree with me in this point, that next to being able to
paint a tolerable picture is having judgment enough to
see what is the matter with a bad one. I don't know if
74 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
your Lordship remembers a few impertinent remarks
of mine upon the ridiculous use of fancy dresses in
portraits about the time that Lord North made us laugh
in describing a Family Piece his Lordship had seen some-
where, but whether your Lordship's memory will reach
this trifling circumstance or not, I will venture to
say that had I painted Lady Dartmouth's picture,
dressed as her ladyship goes, no fault (more than in my
painting in general) would have been found with it.
Believe me, my Lord, though I may appear conceited in
saying it so confidently, I never was far from the mark
but I was able before I pulled the trigger to see the cause
of my missing, and nothing is so common with me as to
give up my own sight in my painting-room rather "than
hazard giving offence to my best customers. You see,
my Lord, I can speak plainly when there is no danger of
having my bones broke, and if your Lordship encourages
my giving still a free opinion upon the matter I will do it
in another line."
The " other line," in which Gainsborough carries
further his argument about costume and portraiture,
was despatched to Lord Dartmouth five days later.
Gainsborough writes on April 13th :
" I can see plainly your Lordship's good nature in
not taking amiss what I wrote in my last, though it is
not so clear to me but your Lordship has some suspicion
that I meant it to spare myself the trouble of painting
another picture of Lady Dartmouth, which time and
opportunity may convince your Lordship was not the in-
tention, and here I give it under my hand that I will
most willingly begin upon a new canvas. But I only for
the present beg your Lordship will give me leave to try
an experiment upon that picture to prove the amazing
effect of dress. I meant to treat it as a cast-off picture
and dress it (contrary, I know, to Lady Dartmouth's
taste) in the modern way ; the worst consequence that
can attend it will be her ladyship's being angry with me
for a time. I am vastly out in my notion if the face does
not immediately look like ; but I must know if Lady
Dartmouth powders or not in common. I only beg to
know that and to have the picture sent down to me, I
promise this, my Lord, that if I boggle a month by way
BATH, 1769-1771 75
of experiment to please myself, it shall not in the least
abate my desire of attempting another to please your
Lordship when I can be in London for that purpose, or
Lady Dartmouth comes to Bath."
Gainsborough's third and last letter is dated April i8th :
" Nothing," he says, " can be more absurd than the
foolish custom of painters dressing people like scara-
mouches and expecting the likeness to appear. Had a
picture voice, action, &c., to make itself known as
actors have upon the stage no disguise would be sufficient
to conceal a person ; but only a face, confined to one view
and not a muscle to move to say, ' Here I am,' falls very
hard upon the poor painter, who perhaps is not within
a mile of the truth in painting the face only. Your Lord-
ship, I am sure, will be sensible of the dress thus far, but
I defy any but a painter of some sagacity (and such you
see I am, my Lord) to be well aware of the different effects
which one part of a picture has upon another, and how
Ihe eye may be cheated as to the appearance of size, &c.,
by an artful management of the accompaniments. A
tune may be so confused by a false bass that if it is ever
so plain, simple, and full of meaning it shall become a
jumble of nonsense, and just so shall a handsome face
be overset by a fictitious bundle of trumpery of the foolish
painter's own inventing. For my part (however your
Lordship may suspect my genius for lying) I have that
regard for truth that I hold the finest invention as a
mere slave in comparison, and believe I shall remain an
ignorant fellow to the end of my days, because I never
could have patience to read poetical impossibilities, the
very food of a painter, especially if he intends to be
knighted in this land of roast beef, so well do serious
people love froth. But, where am I, my Lord, this my
free opinion in another fine with a witness, forgive me,
my Lord, I am but a wild goose at best, all I mean is this,
Lady Dartmouth's picture will look more like and not so
large when dressed properly, and if it does not I will begin
another."
These letters show that Gainsborough ascribed Lord
Dartmouth's disapproval of the portrait to the fact that
Lady Dartmouth had chosen to be painted in fancy
76 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
dress, or at all events in the dress of some period other
than her own. Naturally, Gainsborough's opinions on
the subject are of great ' value, and it is interesting to
compare them with those of Sir Joshua Reynolds. In a
postscript to the second of the three Dartmouth letters
that I have quoted Gainsborough sums up his views on
costume and portraiture. " I am well aware," he says,
" of the objection to modern dresses in portraiture, that
they are soon out of fashion and look awkward, but
that misfortune cannot be helped : we must set against it
the unluckiness of fancy dresses taking away likenesses,
the principal beauty and intention of a portrait."
Reynolds believed that some compromise in the treat-
ment of modem costume was essential in portraiture, at
least in the portraiture of women. The President says
in his Seventh Discourse : " He, therefore, who in his
practice of portrait -painting wishes to dignify his subject,
which we will suppose to be a lady, will not paint her in
the modem dress, the familiarity of which alone is sufficient
to destroy all dignity. He takes care that his work shall
correspond to those ideas and that imagination which
he knows will regulate the judgment of others ; and there-
fore dresses his figure something with the general air of the
antique for the sake of dignity and preserves something
of the modern for the sake of likeness."
Sir Joshua painted Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse,
and Gainsborough as a woman dressed in the height of
fashion, " particularly novelle," as Henry Bate said when
he saw the portrait in the artist's studio. Both works
are masterpieces, but the first is said to have been unlike
the famous original, while the strong resemblance of
Gainsborough's portrait to Mrs. Siddons has been certified
by those who knew the great actress.
In 177 1 a tribute was paid to Gainsborough's skill
by the writer of Observations on the Pictures now exhibit-
ing at the Royal Academy, who says : " After Sir Joshua
Reynolds, Gainsborough seems the best portrait-painter
CAPTAIN WADE
Copyright, ATessrs. Thomas Agnew &■ Sons
BATH, 1769-1771 "jy
we have. His five whole-lengths in the exhibition are
very good. That of the lady in the fancied dress is par-
ticularly graceful. This lady, who has something of a
French look, has a remarkably piercing eye and a sensible
and pohte countenance. The two large landscapes (No.
79 and No. 80) by this painter are very good. They are
executed with a masterly hand and with an excellent
gout of colouring." The " lady in the fancied dress "
(this is Gainsborough's own expression) was Lady Ligonier,
who in the early spring of the year had also given sittings
to Sir Joshua. Gainsborough's remaining portraits at
the Academy of 177 1 were those of Lord Ligonier, Lady
Sussex and her child, Mr. Nuthall, and Captain Wade,
then Master of the Ceremonies at Bath.
After the close of the exhibition Captain Wade's
portrait was brought back to Bath and hung in the New
Assembly Rooms, which had recently been built not far
from Gainsborough's house in The Circus. The portrait
was placed in the card - room, where it was criticised
by the writer of some verses that amused the idlers of
Bath in the following winter, and by a lucky chance
make clear for us the meaning of the re-paintings that
show themselves on the canvas to-day. Gainsborough's
portrait, which is a full length, shows the Captain wearing
a red coat and standing hat in hand at the bottom of a
flight of steps leading to a house, a part of which covers
a considerable portion of the background. The re-
mainder of the background is composed of sky and land-
scape, and when the portrait was exhibited in 1913 by
Messrs. Agnew it was evident that the house and steps
were after-thoughts. They had been painted to conceal
part of the sky and landscape, the details of which can
now be seen plainly because the paint of the super-im-
posed house and steps has become semi-transparent with
age.
The verses referred to are supposed to be written to
a friend in the country by an invalid staying at Bath,
78 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
who is describing a walk through the new Assembly
Rooms :
" All at once I was struck with the portrait of Wade,
Which, tho' like him in features, is much too tall made,
And looks, like its Master — ashamed of his trade.
For it's drawn as if walking alo7ie in the fields
In a jauntee undress which the present mode yields,
Uncovered — as though he intended to bow
To an ox or an ass — to a heifer or cow ;
Thus to keep his hand in that he may not forget.
When he hands out the ladies — to bow and retreat."
So far the writer has described the portrait as it appears
to have been in its first state, with a background entirely
pastoral and therefore not in keeping with the figure of
the Master of the Ceremonies. Gainsborough seems to
have realised this and to have added the steps and
house, for the writer of the verses goes on to say :
" The piece I allude to was since taken down —
Did it then cause a smile it now merits z frown;
It is altered indeed— but made worse by the touch : —
If the Master is meant why not paint him as such ?
Why draw him as if hurrying out of the room
Down a steep flight of steps ? much like those by his home,
Or why must the meadows retain a sly peep ? —
If the fields 7nust be there why not give us some sheep ? "
Despite adverse criticism Captain Wade's portrait re-
mained on the walls of the New Assembly Rooms for a
hundred and thirty years, until its authorship was
almost forgotten. But the tradition that it was from
the hand of Gainsborough was never quite lost, and in
1902 the proprietors of the Rooms put the matter to the
test by submitting the portrait to the examination of
Sir Walter Armstrong and Mr. Morland Agnew, to whom
its authenticity was at once evident. It was put up to
auction in the following year at Christie's, where the
hammer fell at 2100 guineas.
Another glimpse of Gainsborough at Bath at this
time is given in a long letter to Garrick from John Palmer
BATH, 1 769-1 77 1 79
of the Bath theatre. Garrick had asked him to convey
a message to Gainsborough, and this is his reply :
"Bath, Sunday night, 1771.
" Dear Sir, — Mr. Gainsborough has been so very
indifferent, from his attention to and confinement with
his daughter in her illness, and I have been so much en-
gaged with one matter or other, that I had no opportunity
of delivering your message to him until the other night
at the new rooms.
" He says you have sent him wine enough to bribe
the whole Corporation with. I had called at his house
once or twice after his return, and he was too ill to see
anyone. Miss Gainsborough is now as well as ever she
was. He complains very much of Moysey's behaviour ;
who paid no attention to her, declaring that it was a family
complaint and he did not suppose she would ever recover
her senses again ; so that Gainsborough was obliged to
call in Schomberg and Charlton, who called it by its right
name, a delirious fever, and soon cured her. Gains-
borough sent home after this the pictures of Moysey and
his family, which he had painted gratis for him, and the
old doctor paid for the frames.
" Standing under one of the chandeliers with Gains-
borough, admiring the figures which the ingenious Com-
mittee had drawn by Garvey the landscape painter, we
narrowly escaped having our crowns cracked by a branch
falling out of one of the chandeliers ; it was taken little
notice of by the company, but the Committee met upon
the next morning, and that the public might not be
alarmed by it, and to make them easy, put the enclosed
publication in the papers ; which had so good an effect
that the next night they had not two hundred people in
the room ! "
There is more of this letter, but it is unnecessary to
quote the closing paragraph, as it does not concern Gains-
borough. The " publication in the paper " to which
Palmer refers was a paragraph in the Bath Chronicle of
October 24, 1771, which however well intended was not
calculated to reassure the timid. It is not surprising
that the rooms were comparatively empty the night after
the appearance of the managers' advertisement.
8o THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
"New Assembly Rooms . As an alarming and unforeseen
accident happened at the last ball, by one of the branches of
the chandeliers breaking ; to prevent the like in future, and
that the company may be perfectly secure and easy, the
managers have thought proper to remove all the suspected
chandeliers and put others in their places, from which
no accident can be apprehended. October 23, 1771."
Palmer's letter is of singular interest. It shows
Gainsborough in the light of an affectionate father for-
getting everything in his anxiety for his elder daughter,
to whom he was always tenderly attached, although there
was friction between the two a few years later, when he
wrote of Margaret as a good and sensible girl, " but
Insolent and Proud in her behaviour to me at times."
In Dr. Moysey's dreadful verdict there is a foreshadowing
of the mental aberration that in later life affected both
of Gainsborough's daughters, and the suggestion that
Margaret's complaint was hereditary recalls the opinion
of Thicknesse and Angelo that the painter himself was
not far from the line that divides genius from insanity.
Dr. Moysey, who should have had good reason to sym-
pathise with Gainsborough at this crisis, as he had lost
his own daughter in the preceding year, is the physician
mentioned by the artist as " Dr. Moisy " in his letter to
Lord Royston. He was one of the prominent medical
men of this time in Bath, and a person of importance in
that city. Dr. Moysey's son Abel was chosen in 1774 to
represent Bath in Parliament, and Gainsborough painted
a full-length portrait of him, and a smaller study that is
now in the National Gallery. Abel Moysey was a friend
of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and was one of the mourners
who attended the President's funeral. Gainsborough,
as we have seen, painted Dr. Moysey and his family
gratuitously ; and it may be that the full-length of Dr.
Schomberg in the National Gallery was presented to him
in grateful recognition of his share in bringing about the
recovery of Margaret.
BATH, 1769-1771 81
Dr. Ralph Schomberg is said to have been related to
the Duke of Schomberg, William the Third's general,
the founder of the family in whose London house in Pall
Mall Gainsborough afterwards resided. He was the
" Doctor Ralpho " of Garrick, the physician and the
affectionate friend of the actor, who hked everything
about him but his plays. For Schomberg was ambitious
to shine as a dramatic author, and submitted many pieces
to Garrick, by whom they were repeatedly refused. One
of his plays, a small afterpiece, was performed at the
Haymarket about 178 1. His portrait by Gainsborough,
in its connection with the National Gallery, has a curious
history. It was presented to the Gallery by a donor
who unfortunately owned only part of the rights in the
picture. The portrait was exhibited for some time, and
was then claimed by the joint-owners and returned to
them by the Trustees. Years afterwards it was offered
to the National Gallery by a member of the Schomberg
family, and purchased from him for a thousand pounds.
It is remarkable that the only other incident of this kind
in the history of the National Gallery is connected with a
work by Sir Joshua Reynolds, between whom and Gains-
borough rivalry in everything seems to have been pre-
destined. The story of the presentation, temporary loss,
and final recovery of the portrait of Dr. Schomberg, is in
many respects exactly parallel to that of Sir Joshua's
Lady Cockhurn and her Children.
The other physician. Dr. Charlton, who was called in
to consult about Margaret Gainsborough, was a wealthy
man, with a seat in Gloucestershire in addition to a house
in Alfred Buildings, Bath ; and he owned a large collec-
tion of pictures— Italian, French, Flemish and English.
His pictures by Gainsborough included " the celebrated
one of the Woodman going out before sunrise, esteemed
one of the best landscapes ever painted by that ingenious
artist " ; and " A Landscape and Cattle, painted with
great spirit in distemper." The picture of the Woodman
82 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
is said by Fulcher to have been a gift from Gainsborough
to the physician, but on what occasion is not stated.
This work, it should be observed, was not the famous
Woodman, which belonged to a much later period of
Gainsborough's career. Dr. Charlton's portrait, painted
by Gainsborough some years before his daughter's illness,
has already been mentioned. It was exhibited at Spring
Gardens in 1766.
A letter written this year is worth quoting as showing
the high estimation in which Gainsborough was held by
such a circumspect person as James Clutterbuck of
Bath, Garrick's friend and business adviser. Writing to
Garrick on the 4th of May, 1771, he says :
" It is fit you should know that the first of the month
I brought in my chariot from Gainsborough's house in
The Circus, a copy of his exquisite portrait of you ; and
if your idea of gratitude is as high as mine you will never
begrudge the friendship you have bestowed upon the
Painter, who, because he owes you so much thinks it is
not in his power to pay you enough ; whereby he proves
it to demonstration that it is impossible for you to lay
out your benevolence to such advantage as in serving
him. So long as that mother of all the virtues will be
held in estimation, and that will be as long as one honest
heart is left among us, Gainsborough will possess as much
honesty and esteem as a man as he is entitled to as an
artist. Thank him and you — ^you and him — for the
most valuable present it is worth my while (circumstanced
as I am) to accept of, and which affords me more pleasure
than the being next taker to Lord Clive's possessions
could possibly do. The unbounded hberality Gains-
borough possesses hath inclined him — contrary to my
wishes and expostulations — to add a frame (price 55s.)
to my picture."
There is another reference to Gainsborough's gift to
Clutterbuck in an undated letter to Garrick, endorsed by
him on the reverse, " Gainsborough, present of my head to
Mrs. Garrick." Garrick appears to have wished to pay
for the replica intended for Clutterbuck, and for the
BATH, 1769-1771 83
original picture, painted by Gainsborough for Mrs.
Garrick. Gainsborough writes:
" I never will consent that anybody makes a present
of your face to Clutterbuck but myself, because I always
intended a copy (by my own hand) for him, that he may
one day tell me what to do with my money, the only
thing he understands, except jeering of folks, I shall
look upon it that you break in upon my line of happiness
if you mention it ; and as to the original, it was to be
my present to Mrs. Garrick, and so it shall be."
CHAPTER V
BATH, I772-I774
Henderson the actor — " Mr. T. of Bath " — Gainsborough's colour
criticised — The purple-faced peer — Bourgeois on Gainsborough's
advice on colour — A painter of painted women — Gainsborough and
the Bath newspapers — Bath artists' colourmen — Poem on Gains-
borough's Bath pictures — Another portrait of Garrick — The first
quarrel with the Academy — Its reason unknown — A suggested
explanation — Gainsborough paints Dr. Dodd — The doctor sen-
tenced to death — A plot for his escape from prison — The wax
head — A portrait of Philip Thicknesse — The ex-governor's story
of a quarrel with Gainsborough — He claims to have driven Gains-
borough from Bath — The probable reason of the artist's departure
for London — Wright of Derby — Thicknesse in difficulties —
Gainsborough's hospitality — Lord Radnor's patronage.
In 1772 a young actor made his first appearance on the
boards of the Bath Theatre under the name of Courtenay,
and, in the opinion of Gainsborough and other local patrons
of the drama, showed exceptional promise in the part of
Hamlet. Mr. Courtenay was so much encouraged by his
reception in Bath that he dropped his alias, and played
in future under his own name of John Henderson, which
in the course of a few years became almost as well known
as that of Garrick himself. " I have resumed my own
name," wrote Henderson in December 1772, " in a pro-
logue written for me by a gentleman of great talents,
and a painter, though not a painter by profession. His
genius is like the Dryads and Hamadryads, embosomed
in woods and fields. In plain English, he is perhaps the
greatest landscape painter we have." This description
appears at first sight to fit Gainsborough, but the words
" though not a painter by profession," show that Hen-
derson had some one else in his mind. The writer of his
84
BATH, 1772-1774 85
prologue was a neighbour of Gainsborough's, Hving close
by him in The Circus, a Mr. John Taylor, who as " Mr. T.
of Bath," figures in Htimphry Clinker, where Smollett
(who does not mention Gainsborough) praises in the
highest terms his landscapes " painted for amusement."
The gifted Taylor, whose pictures, unfortunately, have
passed into oblivion, was also eulogised by Garrick, who
upon hearing the patronising comment of a local con-
noisseur that Taylor's views of Bath were finely enough
painted "for a gentleman," wrote some verses of protest
on the text —
" Is genius, rarest gift of Heaven,
To the ^?y^^ artist only given ?"
But the be-praised amateur and his neglected profes-
sional neighbour in The Circus had one thing in common.
They were both admirers of Henderson, and with the
actor Gainsborough soon formed a close friendship. How
intimate it became may be judged by the letters I have
already mentioned, in connection with Garrick, as written
by Gainsborough to Henderson. Ireland, who prints the
letters in his memoir of the actor, mentions the writer
as " a gentleman who honoured Henderson with his
friendship and protection the first season he played at
Bath." Gainsborough's letters to his young friend are
full of advice, and of warnings against gluttony, which
seems to have been one of Henderson's besetting sins,
and against the temptations and supposed immorahties
of London. In speaking of London, where his youth
was spent, Gainsborough throws some light upon one of
his own weaknesses, and upon the reason why his wife,
three or four years after the date of his letter to Hen-
derson, was still afraid to trust him alone in the great
town, which, he tells the actor, " was my first school,
and deeply read in petticoats I am."
In another letter Gainsborough refers again to Hen-
derson's gluttony, and, in urging him to follow Garrick,
86 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
gives expression to his views upon the value of originaHty
in the actor's art.
" In all but eating," he writes, " stick to Garrick ;
in that let him stick to you, for I'll be curst if you are
not his master ! Never mind the fools who talk of imi-
tation and copying ; all is imitation, and if you quit that
natural likeness to Garrick which your mother bestowed
upon you, you'll be flung. Ask Garrick else. WTiy, Sir,
what makes the difference, between man and man, is real
performance, and not genius or conception. There are
a thousand Garricks, a thousand Giardinis, and Fischers
and Abels. \Miy only one Garrick with Garrick's eyes,
voice, &c. ? One Giardini with Giardini's fingers, &c. ?
But one Fischer with Fischer's dexterity, quickness,
&c. ? Or more than one Abel with Abel's feehng upon
the instrument ? All the rest of the world are mere
hearers and see'rs."
It was through John Ireland, no doubt, that Gains-
borough and Henderson became friends. Ireland, who was
Henderson's early protector and supporter, and accom-
panied him to Bath on the occasion of his first appear-
ance on the stage, was also intimate with Gainsborough,
who was his frequent guest. Gainsborough gave Ireland
a portrait of Henderson, and promised another to the
actor himself. Writing to the manager of the theatre
at Bath in 1773, Henderson says : " Gainsborough is a
varlet. He promised me a miniature from the picture
of mine, but wits and genius, if they get nothing else
from the Court, learn their d d tricks of promising
and forgetting." Henderson's allusion to the Court in
this letter is mysterious, for there is no reason to believe
that Gainsborough had any commissions from the King
or Queen until some time after he had settled in London.
During the last two or three years of Gainsborough's
residence at Bath, his colouring was the subject of several
uncomplimentary criticisms in the pubHc journals. In
1772 he sent four portraits to the Royal Academy ; and
ten landscapes, two of which were water-colours var-
BATH, 1772-1774 87
nished to give them the appearance of paintings in oil.
This was at one time a favourite practice of Gains-
borough's, and some of his varnished drawings are still
in existence. The Middlesex Journal, commenting upon
his work at the Academy, says : " No one need be in-
formed of Mr. Gainsborough's excellence in portrait
painting, and it may safely be assumed that his per-
formances of this year will lose him none of that fame
which he has so justly acquired by his former productions.
He seems, however, to have one fault, a fault upon the
side of excess — ^his colours are too glowing. It would be
well for him if he would borrow a Httle of the modest
colouring of Sir Joshua Reynolds." This unfavourable
comparison with Reynolds must have been intensely an-
noying to the Bath painter, for the long rivalry between
the two acknowledged leaders of the growing British
School of portraiture had already commenced, and until
the death of Gainsborough the newspapers never ceased
to contrast his achievements with those of Sir Joshua,
and to add new fuel to the burning fire of jealousy on
both sides.
Another critic, writing in the Westminster Magazine
above the initials "J. H.," also falls foul of Gainsborough's
colour.
" Who, for instance," says this writer, " views a paint-
ing of Mr. Gainsborough but must acknowledge that he
throws a dash of purple into every colour from his pencil ?
which must proceed either from his not cleaning it suffi-
ciently, or from a reflection of the purple colour from his
eye. I remember having seen a portrait by him of a
certain nobleman, remarkable for the sobriety of his life,
and who was never known to have been drunk ; but his
Lordship having naturally a very florid complexion, the
addition of Mr. Gainsborough's purple to the colour of
his nose and his cheeks will probably make him pass with
posterity as the damn'dest drunken dog that ever lived.
Mr. Gainsborough will recollect the portrait I mean when
I tell him that the Lady he has painted for its companion
88 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
is drawn working a net, and that particular pains have
been taken in polishing the mahogany table at which
she sits."
I cannot identify the portraits of the nobleman and
the lady mentioned by " J. H." or those shown by Gains-
borough at the Academy of 1772, and am therefore unable
to give any information as to their alleged over-colouring.
However, it is possible that Gainsborough at this time
was making experiments that proved unsuccessful, for
that abuse of colour was exercising his mind in this very
year we know from a letter to Garrick in which he makes
some interesting remarks upon what he believed to be a
general want of restraint in the arts at that time. He
writes thus to his friend :
" When the streets are paved with brilliants and the
skies made of rainbows I suppose you'll be contented and
satisfied with red, blue and yellow. It appears to me
that fashion, let it consist of false or true taste, will have
its run like a runaway horse ; for when eyes and ears
are thoroughly debauched by glare and noise the returning
to modest truth will seem very gloomy for a time, and I
know you are cursedly puzzled how to make this retreat
without putting out your lights and losing the advantage
of all our new discoveries of transparent painting, &c. —
how to satisfy your tawdry friends while you steal back
into the mild evening gleam and quiet middle term.
I'll tell you, my sprightly genius, how this is to be done.
Maintain all your lights, but spare the poor abused
colours till the eye rests and recovers. Keep up your
music by supplying the place of noise by more sound,
more harmony and more tune, and split that cursed fife
and drum. What ever so great a genius as Mr. Garrick
may say or do to support our false taste, he must feel
the truth of what I am now saying, that neither our
plays, paintings or music are any longer real works of
invention, but the abuse of Nature's lights and what has
been already invented in former times."
This advice to Garrick is given with so much feeling
that Gainsborough's letter reads as if he himself had
BATH, 1772-1774 89
lately indulged in a debauch of colour and false brilliancy
and had now returned to " the mild evening gleam and
quiet middle term," the importance of which he im-
pressed later upon an artist (it must be admitted a very
bad one), who was in some degree his pupil. Sir Francis
Bourgeois, R.A., in a letter which I think has not been
quoted before, says :
" The late Mr. Gainsborough, with whom I had the
pleasure of being upon the most intimate terms, favoured
me so far as to come and see my pictures very often,
and he was kind enough to tell me ingenuously what
he thought would contribute to my improvement. Being
particularly desirous of directing my attention to colour,
he used to tell me that a chaste colouring was as neces-
sary to a picture as modesty to an artist."
Gainsborough has been accused by other contem-
porary writers, and especially by Anthony Pasquin, of
exaggerating the natural hues of his sitters' complexions ;
but it must not be forgotten that throughout his career,
and particularly in his Bath period, he had to paint
the portraits of painted women. The practice of making-
up was universal, and was carried to an excess that to
us seems preposterous. It was common alike to ladies
of high degree and those of the demi-monde, and the
Countess of Coventry — one of the beautiful sisters
Gunning — and Sir Joshua's famous model Kitty Fisher
are both supposed to have died through maladies brought
on by the abuse of cosmetics. Condemnatory notes on this
unbecoming and unwholesome fashion were constantly
written by the journalists of the time, and one humourist
among them went so far as to announce with apparent
gravity that an exhibition was shortly to be held by the
members of " The Society of Cosmetic Artists in Paint-
ing, Enamelling and Varnish." Among an imaginary
list of portraits likely to be seen at the exhibition, he
mentions one of " A Maid of Honour, very fine, but a
little damaged by time — after Titian." Some lines pub-
90 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
lished in Bath in 1773 show the extent to which, according
to an anonymous versifier, the practice prevailed in the
city where Gainsborough was then residing.
" The Ladies at Bath make no more of their faces
Than the Painter who daubs o'er his wainscot and bases,
And after three coats they have laid on — or more,
For beauties they'll pass though no beauties before."
The pamphlet is one of many written to criticise and
make game of the habits and weaknesses of the giddy
crowd that in the season thronged the public resorts of
what was then the most fashionable watering-place in
England. From publications such as these, and from
Anstey's well-known New Bath Guide, we can obtain
some idea of the life in which Gainsborough shared ; but
a better picture of his surroundings may be formed by
consulting the contemporary Bath Journal and Bath
Chronicle, although at Bath, as at Ipswich, the best in-
formation in the local papers is to be found in the adver-
tisement pages.
Gainsborough, I think, must have been on bad terms
with the proprietors or editors of these two Bath papers,
which were as prominent in the city then as they are
to-day. The painter was one of the attractions of Bath.
All the great and fashionable people who went there
visited his studio, and many of the most important of
them sat to him. Yet he is rarely mentioned in the
Bath papers except when he pays for an advertisement,
and he obtains at no time the effusive admiration that is
bestowed upon immeasurably inferior and now long
forgotten men. Gainsborough was probably ill-pleased
when his death was announced in the Bath Journal, and
no doubt called upon the editor and expressed his opinion
in plain terms in the quaint and interesting old rooms
that are still part of the offices of the paper, but a mis-
understanding of this kind does not account sufficiently
for his neglect by the local press. One of the rare ap-
pearances of his name in print occurs in 1769, in some
BATH, 1772-1774 91
verses written by a contributor to the Bath Chronicle,
who was impressed, as everyone seems to have been
ahvays, by the strong resemblance of Gainsborough's
portraits to his sitters. The Hues are upon a newly-
painted portrait of " Mrs. S— t— d," and commence —
"The Picture to the Original so Like
You all beholders with amazement strike."
The couplet gives an adequate idea of the literary quality
of the verses, which, however, are far outshone by the
efforts of another writer who three or four months after-
wards laments the death of " the late ingenious ^Ir.
Robins, landscape painter of Bath." Mr. Robins, whose
pictures are forgotten as completely as those of Mr.
Taylor, is lamented in no fewer than twenty-four lines,
of which the following are fairly representative :
"Where now, O Nature, is thy favourite child?
Beneath whose touch the rising landscape smiled,
Whose strokes could call such wondrous scenes to view
As none but Robins and thyself ere knew,"
It is disappointing to read in a subsequent advertisement
that the son of the favourite child of Nature is carrying
on the landscape-painting business of his father, and —
appealing to the NobiUty and Gentry — " humbly begs a
continuance of their favours, which he will gratefully
acknowledge." The Bath newspapers show that Gains-
borough had opportunities of seeing pictures and other
works by and after the Old Masters, besides those in the
private collections to which it is known that he had
access. " Mr. Champione, Italian," advertises in 1765
an exhibition of " a large and curious collection of statues
modelled from the antiques of Italy and France, and a
number of new and old prints after the best masters."
Champione, who travelled about England with his col-
lection, appears again in the advertisement columns in
other years ; and in November 1768, Mr. Samuel Dixon
announced his intention of opening his picture room at
92 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
the Cross, Bath, where he hoped to show his patrons
several Old Masters that had not been exhibited before.
Dixon died two months later, and all his pictures were
offered for immediate sale, with the lowest price that
could be accepted marked on each work.
He was succeeded in the following year by Mr. William
Jones, described always in his advertisements as " Fruit
Painter." Jones, who was an exhibitor at the Royal
Academy and the Society of Artists, was more ambitious
than Dixon, the dealer he followed. His collection in-
cluded examples, real or supposed, of Rubens, Murillo,
Holbein, and Poussin; but his opinioni on attributions
were not in agreement with those of a critic who visited
the gallery, and afterwards spoke disrespectfully of the
masterpieces gathered together by Mr. Jones. The pro-
prietor, undaunted, replied in a letter in which he says
that he has consulted several artists who agree with him
as to the authenticity of his pictures. Unfortunately he
mentions no names, and we cannot tell who were his sup-
porters, but no doubt Gainsborough, as the most pro-
minent local artist, was consulted in the matter. It may
be that from the Jones collection came some of Gains-
borough's Old Masters — Michael Angelos and others —
that his widow found it so difficult to dispose of even
at the lowest prices. The challenge to Jones appears to
have done his gallery no harm, as in 1770 he is advertising
again, and by this time his collection has received im-
portant additions in the shape of pictures by Rembrandt
and Vandyke, and what is said to have been a fine land-
scape by Claude. Mr. Christie, the auctioneer of whom
Gainsborough was afterwards to be the near neighbour
in London, is an occasional advertiser in the Bath papers
at this period.
Little is known of the sources whence Gainsborough
obtained the materials of his profession, but at Bath he
was well off for artists' colourmen, whose advertisements
are frequent in the local journals, although rarely to be
BATH, 1772-1774 93
seen at this time in London papers. Charles Davis, for
example, offers in 1763, at the sign of the Golden Boy
in Horse Street, water-colours in shells, palettes and
palette knives, oils and colours, best London brushes,
and " prim'd cloths," or canvases as we call them now.
Francis Woolley, at the appropriate sign of the St. Luke's
Head, and Joseph Granger in the Market Place, have
colours in the bladders that were universally used by
artists until they were superseded about seventy years
ago by the collapsible tubes now in use ; and the stationer
Basnett can provide drawing paper and chalks, as well
as camel-hair brushes and every requisite for the water-
colour painter. All this shows that the arts were prac-
tised extensively in Bath, where, in addition to the
professionals, there were swarms of amateurs. And for the
amateurs there was always in the season an ample supply
of teachers, including such impudent travelling quacks
as a Mrs. Bradshaw, who, in April 1773, offers to give
instruction in oil painting, although she is only staying
at Bath for a few days. No longer time than this was
needed by Mrs. Bradshaw, who claimed that, by her pro-
cess, " any person may be enabled in a few lessons to
equal the greatest Masters, although wholly unacquainted
with the arts of painting or drawing."
Although the writers in Bath newspapers took little
notice of Gainsborough's pictures, their charm was ap-
preciated to the full by a visitor to the city in 1773, who,
after viewing the works in the studio of the painter,
predicts his future greatness in a poem published in the
Gentleman's Magazine.
VERSES ON SEEING MR. GAINSBOROUGH'S
PICTURES AT BATH
While connoisseurs with artificial eyes,
Mechanically pose, and fix the prize;
While dead to each fine feeling of the heart,
And every principle of taste and art,
94 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
They centre merit in an ancient name
And parcel out by centuries the fame,
Be mine the pleasure, tho' in humble lays.
True modern merit to discern and praise.
Yes, Gainsborough ! yes : thy magic pieces charm,
And want but age dull connoisseurs to warm.
Thy vivid colours, elegant design,
Rich strokes of fancy, chaste and flowing line,
All Nature's beauties in thy tints that glow
At once thy taste and master-judgment show ;
Even beauty's self comes from thy hand improv'd,
And doubly we are charmed with what we loved.
The living landscape on thy canvas wears
New grace, and gay enchantment all appears.
Oh ! to thy charming Cottage let me rove,
That scene of beauty and domestic love ;
There could I gaze for ever, and admire
Thy genius, judgement, elegance and fire :
And, were that Cottage mine, no lordly Peer
For mercenary gold should enter there ;
In high content the matchless prize I'd hold
And rate thy genius far above all gold.
A note explains that the " charming Cottage " refers to
a most elegant painting of Mr. Gainsborough's which
has been purchased by a noble Lord. It is impossible
to guess from the vague indications in the poem which
of Gainsborough's several cottage pictures is referred to,
but it is not likely to have been the famous Cottage Door
at Grosvenor House, as that was not bought by Earl
Grosvenor until 1827.
The portrait of Garrick, already referred to as having
been painted for the actor's wife, was sent to her in
1772. It was painted at a much earlier date, but Gains-
borough liked it so much that he was loth to part with
it, as he shows in the following letter, written to Garrick
to warn him of the approaching arrival of the canvas.
" Bath, June 22nd, 1772.
" Dear Sir, — I ask pardon for having kept your pic-
ture so long from Mrs. Garrick. It has indeed been of
great service in keeping me going ; but my chief reason
BATH, 1772-1774 95
for detaining it so long was the hopes of getting one
copy like, to hang in my own parlour, not as a show
picture but for my own enjoyment, to look when I
please at a great man who has thought me worthy of
some little notice ; but not one copy can I make which
does not as much resemble Mr. Garrick's brother as him-
self — so I have bestowed a drop of excellent varnish to
keep you out, instead of a faUing tear at parting, and
have only to beg of dear Mrs. Garrick to hang it in the
best hght she can find out, and to continue puffing for me
in the manner Mr. Keate informs me she does.
" That you may long continue to delight and surprise
the world with your original face, whilst I hobble after
with my copy, is the sincere wish of, dear Sir, — Your most
unaccountable and obedient servant,
"Thomas Gainsborough.
" P.S. — ^The picture is to go to London by Wiltshire's
flying waggon on Wednesday next ; and I believe will
arrive by Saturday morning."
Gainsborough, always careful to an uncommon degree
about the placing of his pictures, takes care to hint to
Mrs. Garrick that she should hang her husband's por-
trait in a good hght, and he says more upon the same
subject in a postscript to another letter written in the
same year. " A word to the wise. If you let your por-
trait hang up so high only to consult your room, it can
never look without a hardness of countenance and the
painting flat ; it was calculated for breast high and will
never have its effect or hkeness otherwise."
In 1773 mention is made for the first time of a quarrel
between Gainsborough and the Royal Academy. Wal-
pole has written on the front page of his Academy
catalogue for 1773, " Gainsborough and Dance having
disagreed with Sir Joshua Reynolds, did not send any
pictures to this exhibition " ; and that is all the direct
information we possess about the unfortunate misunder-
standing which deprived the Royal Academy exhibitions
of Gainsborough's work until 1777, when he reappeared
96 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
triumphant with a group of canvases that included a
portrait which some regard as his finest achievement.
I have been unable to discover any reference to the
quarrel in the newspapers of 1773, but from Walpole's
statement it appears to have been connected with some-
thing antecedent to the sending-in day for the Academy
Exhibition of that year. Now Gainsborough, as we know,
took no part at this time in the business of the Academy,
or showed the slightest interest in its affairs unless they
concerned the hanging of his own pictures. It is prob-
able, therefore, that the disagreement with Reynolds
was connected with the arrangement of the preceding
Exhibition of 1772, and this is the more hkely because
Nathaniel Dance, who was concerned with Gainsborough
in the quarrel, was on the Council that year.
If, then, the disagreement was in 1772, a statement
that appeared in a newspaper a few days after the opening
of the Academy Exhibition in that year no doubt has
some bearing on the matter.
" We hear," says the Public Advertiser of May 4th,
1772, " that the Gentlemen upon the Committee for
managing the Royal Academy have been guilty of a
scandalous meanness to a capital artist by secreting a
whole length picture of an English Countess for fear their
Majesties should see it ; and this only upon a full con-
viction that it was the best finished picture sent this
year to the exhibition. The same artist has been affronted
in this manner several times before, from which they may
depend upon his implacable resentment, and will hear
from him in a manner that will very much displease
them."
The fiery tone of the concluding sentence of this
paragraph suggests that it was inspired by the impetuous
Gainsborough, who addressed the Academicians in much
the same manner in the later disputes of 1783 and 1784.
Probably the " English Countess " was Horace Walpole's
niece, the widowed Countess Waldegrave, mother of the
BATH, 1 772-1 774 97
three beautiful daughters who figure in Sir Joshua's
famous group. Her connection with the Duke of Glou-
cester, the brother of the King, whose wife she had long
been in secret, had caused serious trouble at Court, and
the Royal Marriage Bill, intended to prevent further
unions of this kind, had been passed in the teeth of the
bitterest opposition in the spring of 1772, immediately
before the opening of the Royal Academy.
Taking all these things together, it seems not unlikely
that Gainsborough painted a portrait of the Countess
Waldegrave which he thought exceptionally good and
sent it to the Academy of 1772 ; and that the diplomatic
Sir Joshua, knowing the King's angry feehng towards the
Countess, and anxious to avoid offending the Academy's
founder and patron, managed, with the support of the
majority of the Council, to keep the portrait out of the
exhibition. Gainsborough may have thought that the
suppression of his work was due not so much to political
exigencies as to the jealousy of his fellow portrait-
painters ; and hence the bitterness of the paragraph in
the Public Advertiser, and his abstention during the fol-
lowing four years. All this, of course, is conjectural, but
it seems a possible explanation of the quarrel, and the
idea that it was connected with the Countess Waldegrave
is supported by the fact that Walpole has pasted on to
the last page of his Academy catalogue for 1772 a cut-
ting from a newspaper containing the paragraph quoted
above. Gainsborough painted two or three portraits of
Walpole's niece, one of which was the exquisite half-
length that was long in the possession of the Duke of
Cambridge, and was sold at Christie's after his death for
£12,705. As I shall show later, it was the treatment by
the Academy of a portrait of the Countess's daughter.
Lady Horatia Waldegrave, that embittered Gains-
borough in 1783, and led to the final rupture of the
following year.
One of Gainsborough's sitters in 1773 was the
G
98 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
notorious Dr. Dodd, tutor of the fifth Lord Chesterfield
(nephew of the writer of the famous Letters), and the
author of many books on religious subjects. Dodd, who
was one of the most popular pulpit orators of the period,
had a chapel at Bath for some time, and both he and his
wife were well known to the Gainsboroughs. The paint-
ing of the portrait was soon followed by a present made
to Mrs. Gainsborough by Mrs. Dodd, who sent her from
London " an elegant silk dress." It was acknowledged
by Gainsborough in a quaint letter, addressed to the
Doctor, at Queen Street, Westminster. Writing on
November 24, 1773, Gainsborough says that he wishes
he could express his gratitude with his pencil instead of
with his pen, and adds :
" Such poUteness cannot be soon or easily forgotten ;
and if I was not afraid of taking from the partiality
Mrs. Dodd has for your picture as it is now, and I thought
it possible to make it ten times handsomer, I would give
it a few touches in the warmth of my gratitude, though
the ladies say it is very handsome as it is ; for I peep
and listen through the keyhole in the door of the painting-
room on purpose to see how you touch them out of the
pulpit as well as in it. Lord, says one, what a lively eye
that gentleman has ! "
Little more than three years after the painting of this
portrait Dodd was convicted of forging Lord Chester-
field's signature and sentenced to death. Unparalleled
efforts were made to obtain a reprieve, and the whole
country was roused by the Doctor's supporters. Among
Gainsborough's friends, many of whom had been well
acquainted with the criminal, the excitement was in-
tense, and the painter's musical cronies. Bach and Abel,
were always disputing about the prevailing topic — Bach
for hanging, Abel for reprieve. The Reverend Henry
Bate, to whom, as I have said, much of the new infor-
mation about Gainsborough in this book is due, worked
hard on Dodd's behalf. He, in company with Sheridan's
BATH, 1772-1774 99
father, went about Soho with ink-bottles in their button-
holes, carrying a long roll of parchment and pens with
which signatures in favour of a reprieve might be in-
scribed. They persisted, in spite of the derision of
Home Tooke, who declared that the populace believed
the couple to be tax-collectors, but their petition and
unnumbered others were sent to the King in vain, and
Dodd suffered the extreme penalty of the law.
In spite of Dodd's deplorable character, women were
foremost in their entreaties for royal clemency, and, if
Philip Thicknesse is to be believed, a woman's ingenuity
might have enabled the forger to escape if he had pos-
sessed more energy and courage. The woman was an
artist and an acquaintance of Gainsborough's ; Mrs.
Phoebe Wright, a popular American modeller of por-
traits in wax, whose daughter afterwards married John
Hoppner, R.A. Mrs. Wright made a life-size wax model
of Dodd's head, and conveyed it beneath her skirts to
the prison where he lay under sentence of death. Dodd
spent most of his time in bed, and Mrs. Wright's idea
was that a dummy figure with a wax head on the pillow
might deceive the keeper sufficiently to permit the
prisoner to slip away unobserved. He was not in irons,
and as his room was frequently full of visitors, Thicknesse
says that the scheme might have been practicable if
Dodd's heart had not failed him, as it did, at the last
moment.
In 1774 Gainsborough decided to leave Bath and
settle in London, and to Philip Thicknesse we owe some
curious particulars of the alleged causes that induced
the painter to transfer himself and his belongings to the
capital. These are given by Thicknesse in a long story
that readers of Gainsborough's biographies must know
by heart, so frequently and so fully has it been quoted.
Briefly, he says that Gainsborough, who had painted the
well-known portrait of Mrs. Thicknesse in 1760, soon
after his arrival in Bath, promised her many years after-
100 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
wards a companion portrait of her husband. This pro-
mise was made in the early part of 1774, and the portrait
was to be a testimony of the painter's gratitude for the
gift Mrs. Thicknesse had made to him of a viol da gamha
of great age and value. Gainsborough, it seems, com-
menced a full-length portrait of Thicknesse, but after
sketching in the head and a few details put the canvas
on one side. He could not be induced to finish it, and
ultimately returned the viol da gamha to Mrs. Thicknesse.
Stripped of all elaboration and side issues, this is the gist
of the story told by Thicknesse, and it is to this episode
alone that the ex-Governor attributes Gainsborough's
departure. " He certainly had never gone from Bath to
London had not this untoward circumstance arisen be-
tween us ; and it is no less singular that I, who had
taken so much pains to remove him to Bath, should be
the cause of driving him from thence." Fulcher, who
bases his story on Thicknesse, says that at Bath :
" Gainsborough, for old associations' sake, suffered
many annoyances which to his proud spirit were hard
to bear. At length Thicknesse's conduct became in-
tolerable and Gainsborough determined to rid himself of
such an incubus. . . . Knowing that there was only one
way of casting off this old man of the sea, Gainsborough
resolved on immediately leaving Bath. Despatching his
goods and chattels by Wiltshire's waggon, he took his
place on the Bath coach and arrived in London in the
summer of 1774."
All this I believe to be imaginary, except that Gains-
borough certainly did leave Bath for London about the
time mentioned. The touches about Wiltshire's waggon
and the stage coach are merely picturesque, and for the
rest there is no authority. Fulcher does not seem to
have asked himself why Gainsborough should suddenly
give up his house and the connection he had built up
at Bath because of a misunderstanding with Thicknesse
about the painting of a portrait. No doubt Gains-
BATH, 1772-1774 loi
borough was on intimate terms with Thicknesse, whom
he had known since the Ipswich days, but he was in no
degree dependent on the patronage of the ex-Govemor.
Why should a quarrel between the two drive Gains-
borough to London, and what difference could it have
made to him or his prosperity if he and Thicknesse were
no longer friends ? Gainsborough in 1774 was already
a man of great reputation, and one of the most distin-
guished residents of Bath, and Thicknesse's boast of
having been the cause of " driving him from thence "
seems absurd when all the circumstances are considered.
It is not unlikely that the departure from Bath may
have been preceded by a quarrel with Thicknesse, and his
excessive vanity perhaps made him believe that this
quarrel was the sole cause of Gainsborough's flight.
But there is a more probable reason for the removal to
London in the summer of 1774. It is to be found in a
letter from Wright of Derby, who estabUshed himself
at Bath in the following year. Wright was not a
Gainsborough by any means, but he was a better painter
than any other Bath man, and when he heard that the
only artist of the first rank had gone to London he
hastened to the western city in the confident hope of
obtaining commissions for portraits.
Wright was bitterly disappointed, as will be seen by
the letter in which he records his experiences. Writing
from Bath on the 9th of February 1776, he says :
" I have now passed one season, the bigger of the
two, without any advantage. The Duchess of Cumber-
land is the only sitter I have had, and her order for a
full-length dwindled to a head only, which has cost me
so much anxiety that I would rather have been without
it ; the great people are so fantastical and whining they
create a world of trouble, though I have but the same
fate as Sir Joshua Reynolds, who painted two pictures
of Her Royal Highness and neither please."
He then complains of the jealousy of the other artists
of the city, which is very injurious to him. But he thinks
102 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
that it will be hardly worth his while to stay and confute
them considering how little business is done in the city
— or has been done for four or five years previously.
" I have heard from London — and from several gen-
tlemen here — that the want of business was the reason
for Gainsborough's leaving Bath. Would I had known
this sooner, for I much repent coming here."
Wright's letter shows that Gainsborough's popularity,
or perhaps the fashion for portrait-painting in general,
had waned in Bath. The days of the " shoals of sitters "
mentioned by Underwood had passed away ; and the
great painter, at his zenith and conscious of excep-
tional powers, was anxious to try his strength with Sir
Joshua and the other artists who worked in the larger
field of London. These, and not the squabble with
Thicknesse, were probably the reasons that induced
Gainsborough to desert the banks of the Avon for those
of the Thames.
With Gainsborough's departure from Bath we take
leave of Philip Thicknesse for many years. He was to
enjoy but for a short time the comfort of the beautiful
new house in The Crescent, where he says the bargain
was made about the portrait and the viol da ganiba, and
to which he had only recently removed from Walcot
Parade. The ex-Governor was involved in financial
difficulties caused by the loss of an action at law almost
immediately after Gainsborough had left for London,
and throughout the spring and early summer of 1775 he
was making strenuous efforts to get rid of the house in
The Crescent and all its contents. The house was offered
for sale on the 2nd of March, and on the 25th of the same
month the pictures, plate, books, music, and musical in-
struments were put up to auction. There were but few
bidders, and in April, at the still unsold house in The
Crescent, were to be seen " some good pictures by Gains-
borough and other Masters in elegant gilt frames ; a fine
BATH, 1772-1774 103
Milanese fiddle, a treble Welch harp, a guitar, and other
musical instruments." Thicknesse announced that all
these articles were on view every day from eleven to
three, with the prices marked on each lot.
What prices were placed upon the Gainsboroughs, or
what became of most of them, I have been unable to dis-
cover, but the full-length portrait of Mrs. Thicknesse was
not sold, and was still in the possession of that extra-
ordinary woman when she died at a great age fifty years
later. Mrs. Thicknesse, who after Gainsborough left
Bath figures no more in his history, was one of the most
brilliant amateur musicians of her day. She made a
reputation as a writer, was accomplished in many other
directions, and could converse with equal ease and fluency
in French, German, Spanish, and ItaUan. Her physical
endowments were no less remarkable, for we are told
that at eighty-seven " her eyesight was as perfect as at
twenty ; her hair luxuriant and without a grey tress in
it ; her teeth — not one deficient — retaining their enamel
and durability."
Thicknesse, who in April 1775 failed to find a pur-
chaser for his house at Bath, made in May a despairing
appeal to the King for assistance, on the ground of long
service in several chmates. The petition, though backed
by two or three noblemen, was rejected, and in June he
and his family set out for the Continent, where he be-
Heved that he could live at less expense than was pos-
sible in England. He remained abroad for some years,
and contributed a number of descriptive articles signed
" A Traveller " to the St. James's Chronicle, a journal
with which he maintained a connection until nearly the
end of his Ufe. His intercourse with Gainsborough was
not broken off by the Bath quarrel, to which perhaps
the painter did not attach so much importance as Thick-
nesse imagined. Some sort of acquaintanceship was
certainly kept up between them, and I think that
Thicknesse was the writer of two or three letters about
104 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
Gainsborough's brother Humphry which appeared in the
Gentleman's Magazine ; and of another letter, defending
the painter in the quarrel with the Academy, that was
published in the St. James's Chronicle in 1784.
Shortly before Gainsborough left Bath a man con-
nected with a noble family shot himself at a house in
Orange Grove. The letters of the suicide, who was
known to Thicknesse, showed that his death left a woman
and child in London in actual want, and the ex-Governor
raised a fund to help them. He obtained only twelve
subscriptions, one of which was from Gainsborough,
who was on his way to the theatre when Thicknesse met
him and showed him a pathetic appeal from the woman.
The tender-hearted Gainsborough was deeply touched.
He returned at once to his house and wrote the follow-
ing letter to Thicknesse :
" My dear Sir,— I could not go to the play to-night
until I had relieved my mind by sending you the enclosed
banknote, and beg you will transmit it to the afflicted
woman by to-night's post. — Yours sincerely,
" Thomas Gainsborough."
Of his family and social life, whether in Bath or in
London, very little is known. Fulcher says, " At Bath
Gainsborough kept a good table and spent his money
freely, features in his character the ex-Governor knew
well how to appreciate. He often shared the painter's
hospitaHty, and has recorded some of his host's sayings
and doings on such occasions." But all this appears to
be based on the statement by Thicknesse that he once
went to supper at his friend's house. We know that
Gainsborough had a spare bedroom in the house in The
Circus, as he offered it to William Jackson ; but so far
from his keeping a good table Thicknesse states par-
ticularly that he was rarely allowed by his wife to enter-
tain his friends at home, and that it was this restraint
BATH, 1772-1774 105
that drove him into irregularities abroad. But if Gains-
borough played on occasion at Bath without restraint
or propriety he also worked hard, and he certainly left
a number of pictures behind him when he went to London
in 1774. John Britton the antiquarian says that as late
as 180 1 he saw in a house in The Circus more than fifty
paintings and sketches from Gainsborough's brush.
Among Gainsborough's patrons in his later years at
Bath Lord Radnor should not be forgotten. William,
first Earl of Radnor, who was the son of Lord Folkestone,
the original President of the Society of Arts, gave Gains-
borough many commissions for portraits at Bath, and
the prices paid for some of them are mentioned in the
catalogue of the family pictures compiled by Helen
Matilda, Countess of Radnor, and Mr. Barclay Squire.
The first Earl sat himself for a half-length in 1770, and he
notes in his account -book on January 5, 1772, " Paid
Gainsborough for my picture, £63." In 1774 he paid the
artist two hundred and fifty guineas for six other paintings
of various members of his family. One of these is the
beautiful study of the Hon. Edward Bouverie, painted
when a boy of thirteen or fourteen, and shown wearing a
blue Vandyke dress. This fine portrait, which was at
the Royal Academy (Old Masters) in 1912, bears the date
of 1773. Lord Radnor's interest in the artist was not
confined to these portraits. It will be seen in the next
chapter how his influence was exerted to obtain for Gains-
borough a commission from the Society of Arts the year
after he settled in London.
CHAPTER VI
LONDON, 1774-I776
Gainsborough in London — The harpsichord from Broadwood's —
Schomberg House — The " three hundred a year " legend — The
actual rent — Graham's Temple of Health — Where Gainsborough
painted — The garden studios — The founder of Christie's — Death
of Joshua Kirby — Gainsborough declines to serve on the Academy
Council, but votes at many elections — Paints figures for Bach and
Abel's concert room — Gainsborough and the Court — Inaccurate
statements of his biographers — " A famous painter's in Pall Mall "
— Gainsborough robbed by highwaymen — His nephew's watch —
Capture of the highwaymen — Brother Humphry — Gainsborough
prosperous but unhappy — A self-revealing letter — The painter's
daughters — A curious commission from the Society of Arts.
It was in May or June 1774 that Gainsborough riding
the grey horse given to him by Wiltshire, set out from
Bath on his journey to the city in which he was to gain the
friendship and patronage of the King and Queen ; and
to discover a powerful journalistic champion who, to the
last day of the artist's life, supported him with never-
failing zeal and courage. These were to come, but at
the moment of Gainsborough's arrival in London the
outlook was unpromising. The political horizon was
clouded, the incident of the tea-chests at Boston harbour
was of recent occurrence, and men's minds were too much
occupied with the prospects of trouble with the American
colonies to concern themselves with pictures or painters.
In art Gainsborough's prospects were not encouraging.
Sir Joshua Reynolds, against whom the traveller from
Bath came to pit himself, was showing this year at the
Royal Academy some of his finest canvases, including
the magnificent group of The Graces decorating a terminal
figure of Hymen that is now in the National Gallery,
and the newcomer must have realised that even at his
106
LONDON, 1774-1776 107
best he could barely cope with such a master of por-
traiture as the President.
Whatever the reason may have been, Gainsborough
probably left Bath, as Thicknesse says, at short notice,
and an entry in the books of Messrs. Broadwood & Co.,
the piano manufacturers, suggests that his removal to
London in 1774 was not anticipated in March of that
year. Messrs. Broadwood sent to " Mr. Gainsborough,
Painter, in the Circle, Bath," on March nth, a harpsichord
which had been selected on his behalf a few days earlier
by Giardini the viohnist. It is unlikely that he would
have ordered such a large and heavy instrument as a
harpsichord to be sent to Bath if he had thought it
possible that he would be moving to London with all
his belongings only a few weeks afterwards. The last
glimpse we have of him at Bath is given in a letter,
pubhshed in the reports of the Historical Commission,
and dated April 13, 1774, in which Eliza Orlebar writes
that on the day preceding she had visited the studios
of Mr. Hoare and Mr. Gainsborough, and that " she
greatly preferred the portraits by the latter, as they are
such very good hkenesses."
The exact date, hitherto imknown, when Gains-
borough took the western portion of Schomberg House,
I have been able to discover through the courtesy of
Mr. John Hunt, the Town Clerk of Westminster, who
examined the rate-books of the period at my request,
and found that the painter's tenancy commenced at
i\Iidsummer 1774. At the same time Mr. Hunt's researches
proved the inaccuracy of a Gainsborough legend that
originated with Thicknesse and has been repeated by
every biographer in turn. Thicknesse, in teUing the story
of the quarrel which he says drove the artist from Bath,
writes : " Upon the receipt of that note he went directly
to London, took a house in Pall Mall at three hundred
pounds a year rent, and returned to Bath to pack up his
goods and pictures." The Westminster rate-books show
io8 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
that Gainsborough's rent in Pall Mall was not three
hundred pounds a year but a hundred and fifty. This,
for some unexplained reason, was reduced in 1783 to a
hundred and twelve pounds, at which figure the rent re-
mained until 1792, when Mrs. Gainsborough gave up
possession.
Schomberg House, where Gainsborough lived until
his death in 1788, was originally the residence of the Dukes
of Schomberg. Afterwards it became the property of
Lord Holdernesse, from whom it was acquired by John
Astley, a painter and a fellow-student of Reynolds.
According to a lengthy biography of Astley, published
soon after his death in 1787, Lord Holdernesse offered
him Schomberg House for £5000, and held to his offer,
although he knew before the contract was signed that he
could have had £7000 for it from Lord Melbourne.
We are told that Astley, who had married a rich widow,
spent another £5000 in altering the house. " The
centre he himself inhabited, and raised that fine room
where Dr. Graham, with such infamy to the police which
suffered him, preceded Cosway. There, too, he built
an attic story which, for the surprises of scenery in a
town like London, should be seen by all who come to it."
Dr. Graham, whose lectures, with their demonstra-
tions of the human figure unadorned, scandalised the town,
was the notorious personage whose earth baths and elec-
trical machine were tried upon Sir Walter Scott when a
child in a vain effort to cure his lameness. Sir Walter,
who thought that Graham had a touch of madness in
his composition, remembered him at Edinburgh when
he used to attend the Greyfriars Church in a gay suit of
white and silver, with a chapeau bras, " and his hair mar-
vellously dressed into a sort of double toupee, like the two
towers of Parnassus. Lady Hamilton is said to have
first enacted his Goddess of Health." The tradition that
Nelson's enchantress posed at Graham's lectures appears
to have no foundation in fact, but out of it has grown
LONDON, 1 774-1 776 109
the legend that Gainsborough painted from Lady Hamil-
ton the picture in the National Gallery, Musidora
bathing her Feet. The attractions of Graham's Temple
of Health included the reading of lectures by Ann Curtis
— ^to the horror of that embodiment of propriety, Mrs.
Siddons, whose sister the lecturer was — ^but the noisy
crowds who flocked to Pall Mall were drawn there by
the Goddess of Health, the Celestial Bed, and similar
unedifying spectacles. These ultimately brought down
upon the head of Gainsborough's next-door neighbour
the wrath and the interference of the Bishop of London.
The eastern wing of the former home of the Schom-
bergs was pulled down more than sixty years ago, but the
centre portion, unchanged externally, still stands in Pall
Mall ; and so, too, does Gainsborough's house, although
described as " demolished " in one of the most recently
published biographies of the artist.
At Schomberg House, as at the house in The Circus
at Bath, we are confronted with the problem — where did
Gainsborough paint ? The front of the house faces the
north, the aspect usually preferred by artists, but no
room in the front is suitable for the painting of any but
small pictures. The portion of the building occupied by
Gainsborough has a comparatively narrow frontage,
and a third or more of this is taken up on each floor by
small rooms projecting from the main wall above the
entrance doorway. It has been suggested that Gains-
borough used one of the front rooms as his studio, but it
seems to me, after seeing the rooms, that this was im-
possible. We know that Gainsborough painted numerous
full-length portraits and groups as well as large landscapes
at Schomberg House. He painted standing, and used
brushes with handles six feet long, and could still find
room for the youthful J. T. Smith to stand behind him
and watch him at work. This implies a fairly large studio,
and as he admitted donkeys, pigs, and other animals
into his painting-room it seems certain that it must have
no THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
been on the ground floor. Probably it was a large room
built over the garden, of which more presently.
Entering Schomberg House by the doorway beneath
the memorial tablet to Gainsborough, erected by the
Society of Arts in 1881, the visitor finds himself in a
square hall, on one side of which is a small room, long
and narrow and lighted by a window looking on to Pall
Mall. Passing through the square hall, a more spacious
inner hall is reached, from whence a circular staircase
leads to the upper part of the house. This inner hall
covers nearly all the width of the house, and as it is lighted
by a glass roof it is well adapted for the display of pictures.
Gainsborough evidently used it for this purpose, as a
visitor to his house in 1787 says that " in the hall there
is a large landscape, and in the small room three or four
landscapes, all lately painted by Gainsborough." The
" small room " was probably the one adjoining the outer
hall, with a window looking on to Pall Mall.
From the staircase hall a long passage leads to the
large room already mentioned as built over the garden,
and now used as a drawing office by members of the
architectural staff of the War Office. The passage is
no doubt the corridor which Beechey described as leading
to Gainsborough's studio, and hung in the artist's life-
time with unsold landscapes. The garden room is,
roughly, about thirty-five feet in length by twenty-five
in breadth and proportionately high, but the light,
though ample in quantity, comes from a window looking
south. Whether Gainsborough could have painted in
a south light, or whether he had another window to the
east or north, it is impossible to say ; but this room and
another above it, similar in size, shape, and lighting,
appear to have been the only places at Schomberg House
in which he could have worked. In one of the two he
may have exhibited his pictures after the quarrel with
the Academy in 1784. Except the staircase hall there
is no room in Schomberg House itself in which large
LONDON, 1774-1776 III
canvases could have been shown, and Gainsborough, in
his first private exhibition of 1784, found room some-
where to hang ten full-length and twelve half or three-
quarter-length portraits, in addition to subject pictures
and landscapes.
In speaking of the building in the garden I am assum-
ing that it was in existence in Gainsborough's time. I
have no certain evidence on this point, but the building
is marked on the large plan of Pall Mall drawn by T.
Chawner of the Office of \\'orks in 1796, only four years
after Mrs. Gainsborough left Schomberg House. It seems
likely that both the garden rooms mentioned were in
existence and used by Gainsborough, as at the exhibition
of his work held in 1789, a few months after his death,
some of the pictures (one of them a very large landscape)
were shown in " the upper room," and in the contemporary
notes on the exhibition there are frequent mentions of
the " rooms " in which the artist worked. Everything
points to Gainsborough's use of some larger room than
any of those contained in Schomberg House itself. The
Morning Herald in its announcement of Gainsborough's
first exhibition in 1784 says that he is preparing his
" saloon " for the purpose ; and the fact that seven
hundred people visited the exhibition of 1789 on the last
day suggests that it must have been held in fairly spacious
apartments. It should be remembered that in these
notes on Gainsborough in Pall Mall I am referring to
the old house of the Dukes of Schomberg and not to the
present Schomberg House close by it, now the residence
of Prince Christian.
When Chawner made his plan in 1796 it was accom-
panied by some excellent drawings of the elevation of
the houses in Pall Mall, which show Christie's sale-rooms
adjoining Schomberg House on the eastern side. Here
the auctioneer appears to have occupied two houses with
a passage in the centre leading to a large room or hall
which, as in the case of Gainsborough's house, almost
112 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
covered the garden. The painter was therefore only a
few yards from the auction rooms in which he is said to
have spent some of his happiest hours of relaxation.
The founder of the firm of Christie was on the most
friendly terms with Gainsborough, who painted a portrait
of him which was shown at the Academy Exhibition of
1778, and for many years afterwards adorned the walls
of the auction rooms. There is a story that it was placed
there at Gainsborough's request, as an advertisement,
but this is unlikely. In 1778 Gainsborough needed
neither advertisement nor commissions, for he had then
been settled in London for four years and his position
in the front rank of portrait-painters was assured. He
was perhaps more useful to Christie than Christie was to
him. The auctioneer, a shrewd and sensible man of
business, is said to have made a practice of showing
privately to the eminent artists of his day every impor-
tation of valuable pictures that was consigned to him from
abroad, and among the artists whom he thus consulted
was his neighbour Gainsborough.
A correspondent of the Library of the Fine Arts, writing
about forty years after Gainsborough's death, when re-
calling the artists of a preceding generation, said of the
master of Schomberg House " that whenever he appeared,
either at a morning lounge, at Christie's amidst the en-
lightened and pohte, or at My Lady's midnight rout
surrounded by bowing beaux and curtseying belles, his
gaiety enlivened every group. He knew everybody and
everybody knew him ; he was, however, most at home
with the worthies of the auction room." For some years
Garrick was frequently his companion at Christie's, where
the amusement caused by the humour common to both
never failed to give an additional zest to the proceedings.
Mr. Christie, says the same \\Titer, often declared that
the presence of this choice pair added fifteen per cent,
to his commission on a sale.
The first year of Gainsborough's hfe in London was
LONDON, 1 774-1 776 113
not free from anxiety. He was a stranger, knowing few
of his fellow-members of the Academy, and not much
loved by any of them, and he had not yet obtained the
support of the Rev. Henry Bate, then the editor of the
Morning Post, who, in his sketch of Gainsborough's life,
admits that the painter's earlier period in Pall Mall was
spent " not very profitably." A great trouble was the
death of Joshua Kirby, who had long been resident in
London, where Gainsborough must have hoped to renew
the close and happy intimacy of the old days at Ipswich.
Kirby died on the 20th of June 1774, three or four days
before the commencement of his friend's tenancy of
Schomberg House. There was friction, too, with the
Royal Academy, but this probably troubled Gainsborough
but little. As he was now living in London he was
appointed to the Council of the Academy at the meeting
held on December 10, 1774, and even had a vote for
the Presidentship, for which in this year West, Chambers,
Dance, and Hone also received one or more proxies.
The new members of Council elected with him were
Barry, Cosway, and the miniature painter, Jeremiah
Meyer.
That Gainsborough neglected his duties is shown by
the following entry in the minutes of the Royal Academy
Council of December 4, 1775 : " Read the list of the
Academicians eligible as Council for next year, and Mr.
Gainsborough, having declined any office in the Academy
and having never attended : Resolved, That his name
be omitted." This decision was overruled at the General
Assembly of December 11, when it was resolved " That
Thomas Gainsborough, Esq., continues on the Council."
But he never served, nor was his name placed again on
the Ust, as it would have been if the laws of the Academy
were observed. The rule governing this point was often
infringed in the early years of the Academy's existence,
and it was not until 1800, when Tresham, who had not
been placed on the Council in his turn, complained to the
H
114 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
King, that the original plan of succession by rotation was
ordered to be observed strictly, as it has been to this day.
Although he never served on the Council or assisted
in the arrangement of the exhibitions, the minutes show
that Gainsborough had more to do with the Academy
than has hitherto been supposed. Northcote declared
that he only once took part in its business, when he at-
tended a meeting to vote for his friend Garvey, who was
elected RA. on the nth of February 1783. This is
erroneous, for Gainsborough voted at eight or nine elec-
tions either in person or by proxy, and two of his votes
were given after the great quarrel of 1784, when he with-
drew all his pictures from the exhibition. There are many
incidental references to Gainsborough in the minutes, to
some of which I shall have occasion to refer later on.
By his many friends among musicians Gainsborough
was warmly welcomed on his arrival in London, and
a letter in the Harris correspondence shows that he
was soon busily engaged assisting Bach and Abel in the
decoration of their new concert room, which was opened
on the ist of February 1775. Mrs. Harris, writing to
her son in Berlin on the 3rd of February, says :
" Your father and Gertrude attended Bach's concert
Wednesday ; it was the opening of his new room, which
by all accounts is the most elegant room in town ; it is
larger than Almack's. The statue of Apollo is placed
just behind the orchestra, but it is thought too large and
clumsy. There are ten other figures or pictures bigger
than hfe. They are painted by some of our most eminent
artists ; such as West, Gainsbro', Cipriani, &c. These
pictures are all transparent and are hghted behind ; and
that light is sufficient to illuminate the room without
lustres or any candles appearing. The ceiling is domed
and beautifully painted, with alto-relievos in all the piers.
The pictures are chiefly fanciful. A Comic Muse by
Gainsborough is most spoken of."
Nothing had been sent by Gainsborough to the
Academies of 1773 or 1774, although in the latter year
LONDON, 1774-1776 115
he showed a portrait at the rival Free Society of Artists.
Nor did he send to the Academy in 1775, when Reynolds,
among other things, showed his idealised portrait of one
of Gainsborough's favourite models, Mrs. Sheridan as
St. Cecilia. The newspapers of 1775 note with regret
the absence from the exhibition of Gainsborough, Dance,
and Cipriani. " There is a great miss of some of the
principal artists," says one of the critics, " and even
those who have exhibited are very short of their former
excellence."
We know little about Gainsborough's work at this
period, but some of the statements made respecting it
are certainly inaccurate. Cunningham, in speaking of
the artist's earlier days in London, says : "A conversa-
tion or family piece of the King, the Queen, and the three
Royal sisters was much admired " ; and Sir Walter
Armstrong adopts Cunningham's statement, and adds that
the painting of this family group " turned the current of
fashion strongly towards Pall Mall." No such picture as
this family group is known to exist, and there is no record
or tradition of any work of the kind. Cunningham's re-
mark was based upon an inaccurate reading of Thicknesse,
who mentions among Gainsborough's best-known por-
traits " his Majesty George the Third, the Queen, the
three Royal sisters upon one canvas." Thicknesse
meant by this not one picture but three, and Cunningham
was misled by the punctuation of the ex-Governor.
According to Dr. Watkins, the biographer of Queen
Charlotte, it was Joshua Kirby who first called the atten-
tion of George the Third to the merits of Gainsborough's
work — a circumstance, says Watkins, " which that ex-
cellent painter ever remembered with gratitude." Kirby,
whose position gave him access to the royal ear, probably
lost no chance of furthering the interests of his dearest
friend, and it may be that hopes of Court patronage were
among the influences that drew Gainsborough from Bath
to London. But Kirby 's death, almost at the moment
ii6 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
of the painter's arrival in town, destroyed for the time
all chance of obtaining commissions from Buckingham
House, and upon this point Fulcher is as misinformed
as Cunningham. He says that " before Gainsborough
had been many months in London he received a summons
to the Palace. It was soon known that the King and
Queen had sat to him."
The King and Queen certainly did sit to Gainsborough,
and more than once, but not until a much later period
than 1774-5. The date is unknown of the painting of
the portraits of their Majesties shown in the Royal
Academy of 1781, but it could not have been as early as
Fulcher states. A letter written by Gainsborough to
the Hon. Thomas Stratford in 1777 proves that up to
that time he had not succeeded in obtaining Court
patronage. "If I ever have anything to do at St.
James's," writes the artist, " it must be through your
interest and singular friendship for me." But if Gains-
borough secured no footing at Court until after 1777
there is reason to beheve that he was painting royalties
of some kind within a year of his settlement at Schom-
berg House. A paragraph in the Morning Chronicle, in
April 1775, must, I think, refer to him. " The Duke and
Duchess of Gloucester are often going to a famous painter's
in Pall Mall ; and 'tis reported that he is now doing both
their pictures, which are intended to be presented to a
Great Lady."
Later in the year 1775 George Selwyn took his daughter
— or supposed daughter — to sit at Schomberg House.
In a letter to Lord Carlisle he says : "I have been with
Mie Mie to Gainsborough, to finish her picture." " Mie
Mie," the httle girl to whom Selwyn was so tenderly
attached, was Maria Fagniani, afterwards the wife of
the third Marquis of Hertford, satirised by Thackeray
as Lord Steyne ; and the mother of the fourth marquis,
to whom more than any other person is due the formation
of the Wallace Collection.
LONDON, 1774-1776 117
Gainsborough's adventure with highwaymen in 1775
has escaped the notice of every writer on the artist. It
attracted considerable attention at the time, but less
upon Gainsborough's account than upon that of the well-
known musician who was robbed on the same occasion.
The highwaymen, who were the dread of travellers
throughout the eighteenth century, were especially daring
at this period, when, as Walpole declared, " you were
robbed every hundred yards." They spared few. Lord
North, when Prime Minister, was robbed on Hounslow
Heath, and Burke suffered a similar fate on Finchley
Common. Highwaymen infested the suburbs of London,
and the proprietors of Ranelagh took the precaution
to advertise that for the safety of visitors to the Gardens
" An armed guard on Horseback will patrol the road."
Rowlandson, the caricaturist, had his watch and five
guineas taken from him by two men in Wardour Street,
who appeared, says a humorous chronicler of the occur-
rence, to have had some idea of Rowlandson's profes-
sion, as they commanded him to hand over his property
" without making any wry faces." Gainsborough's
friend, Christie the auctioneer, was eased of nine guineas
when driving with two ladies near London ; and Dr.
Trusler, one of the proprietors of the Morning Post, was
robbed, together with his wife, between Vauxhall and
Clapham. The valiant editor of the Morning Post seems
alone to have escaped the attentions of the gentlemen
of the road, none of whom had the temerity to interfere
with such a formidable personage as the Reverend Henry
Bate.
Late on the evening of the 7th of June 1775, Gains-
borough was returning to town in a chaise, when he was
stopped on the main Western road, just before reaching
Hammersmith, by two horsemen, who robbed him of
two guineas and a watch. Apparently Gainsborough
was one of a party, as John Christian Bach, who was in
a carriage immediately in front of him, was robbed by
ii8 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
the same men. Abel, the viol da gamba player, whose
music moved Gainsborough so strangely, was also of the
company, but was not robbed, or at all events made no
charge against either of the men when they were brought
before Sir John Fielding at Bow Street. It speaks well
for the energy of Sir John's officers that the thieves were
arrested in the course of a day or two with some of the
stolen property in their possession. The highwaymen,
Henry McAllister and Archibald Girdwood, were traced
through the agency of the ostler of the Star Tavern,
Blackman Street, Borough, from whom their horses
were hired. They were lodging together, close at hand,
in the house of a surgeon in Kent Street, and in their
room Sir John Fielding's clerk, Mr. Bond, found Bach's
watch. Bach's chain and seals, and Gainsborough's
watch, were found in Girdwood's pocket.
Both men were committed by Sir John Fielding,
and tried twice at the Old Bailey — before Baron Hotham
for robbing Gainsborough, and before the Recorder for
robbing Bach. The composer had lost a gold watch
valued at £20, a chain worth £3, and one guinea in
cash. In giving his evidence he explained that he
was coming to town on the evening of the 7th of June
and was attacked by a highwayman about half a mile
from Hammersmith. " He cried, ' Stop, your money or
your watch ! ' That waked me, for I was asleep in my
carriage. He took my watch and a guinea ; the business
was very soon over. I should not know the person who
robbed me. It was about half -past nine or near ten
o'clock." When Girdwood and McAllister were brought
before Baron Hotham they were charged " that they in
the King's highway in and upon Thomas Gainsborough
did make an assault, putting him in corporeal fear and
danger of his life, and taking from his person a watch
with the inside case made of metal and the outside case
covered with shagreen, and two guineas in money, the
property of the said Thomas, June 7th." In the witness-
LONDON, 1774-1776 119
box Gainsborough testified that on the occasion in
question he was robbed of some money and a watch in a
shagreen case ; but although the watch had been found
in the pocket of the prisoner Girdwood, both men for
some reason were acquitted on this charge, and Girdwood
alone was convicted of robbing Bach. However, there
were other charges against the two highwaymen, and when
the sessions ended on the 17th of July William McAlHster
and John Girdwood were sentenced to death. Of the fate
of Girdwood I have found no record, but McAllister was
hanged at Tyburn on the i6th of August 1775.
One interesting point remains to be mentioned con-
cerning the watch of which Gainsborough was robbed on
the evening of the 7th of June. In giving his evidence at
Bow Street before Sir John Fielding he said that the watch
did not belong to him but to a relation from whom he
had borrowed it on the day of the robbery. The relation
was his nephew, Gainsborough Dupont, who at the trial
at the Old Bailey identified the metal watch in a shagreen
case. No. 1271, maker H. Betterton, and claimed it as his
property. Gainsborough Dupont was himself robbed on
the road thirteen years later. A few weeks after the death
of his uncle, in 1788, he was travelling one night in October
in a postchaise from Windsor to Richmond, where the
Gainsboroughs had a house, when he was stopped by
two footpads, who took from him three guineas and
some silver. He was also robbed of a watch, but as no
description was given it is impossible to say whether it
was the same one he had lost and recovered before. One
of the thieves who had stopped the postchaise returned
to it before Dupont drove off and gave him back sufficient
money to pay the tolls, a courtesy that was not uncom-
mon among highwaymen and footpads. At the same
time he apologised to the artist for robbing him, and
declared that distress alone had driven him to such a
desperate course.
John Christian Bach, Gainsborough's fellow-victim in
120 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
the affair with the highwaymen, was the youngest son of
the great John Sebastian Bach, and himself a musician
of some eminence. He wrote several operettas and many
compositions for the piano, and was conductor to Queen
Charlotte. J ohn Christian Bach, who hved for many years
in England, was the inseparable companion and partner
of Abel, who was with him on the night of the robbery.
The two musicians shared a house between them, and
were both connoisseurs of pictures and prints. Angelo
says that Bach used to hsten to Gainsborough's musical
performances, and after interrupting them with an occa-
sional ironical " Bravo ! " would at length push the
painter from his seat at the harpsichord, upon which he
would then "flourish voluntaries as if inspired." Bach
died in poverty in 1782, and is buried in the churchyard of
St. Pancras.
After his removal to London Gainsborough corre-
sponded regularly with his sister, Mrs. Gibbon, who let
apartments at Bath ; and he appears to have maintained
friendly relations with the other members of his family,
although his patience was tried by frequent appeals for
money from that ingenious but half-crazy inventor, his
brother John. Gainsborough was much attached to
his brother Humphry, who at this time was the pastor
of the Independent chapel in South Street, Henley.
Humphry Gainsborough shared with John a natural
faculty for mechanics and engineering, but he had a power
of applying his knowledge to practical ends that was
denied to his eldest brother. He was awarded a premium
by the Society of Arts for designs for a drill-plough and
a tide-mill, and according to Mr. G. D. Leshe, R.A., who
has an interesting note on Humphry Gainsborough in Our
River, he superintended the making of several new roads
in and near Henley, constructed the parochial weighing
machine, and designed the adjoining locks in the Thames.
Of the locks at Henley he had charge, as a letter shows
which Gainsborough wrote to Mrs. Gibbon in November
LONDON, 1774-1776 121
1775, not long after Humphry had lost his wife, whose
death is recorded in an epitaph on the walls of the South
Street chapel.
" We return you our best thanks," says Gainsborough
to his sister, " for the excellent present of fish,
which turned out as good as ever was eaten, and
came very timely for Brother Humphry to take part
with us. He went home to Henley to-day, having been
with us ten days, which was as long as he could well be
absent from his business of collecting the tolls upon the
river. He was as well as could be expected, considering
his affliction for the loss of his poor wife."
Gainsborough in another part of this letter mentions
an epidemic ot influenza that was then prevailing in
London and had attacked all the family at Schomberg
House, and after congratulating his sister upon the success
of her lodging-house, concludes :
" I told Humphry you were a rank Methodist, who
says you had better be a Presbyterian, but I say Church
of England. It does not signify what if you are but free
from hypocrisy and don't set yo\ir heart upon worldly
honours and wealth."
Six weeks afterwards, at Christmas 1775, Gainsborough
sent to Mrs. Gibbon another and longer letter, which is
more self-revealing than anything else in his correspond-
ence. Written a year and a half after his arrival in
London, it is the letter of a man unhappy and despondent
in spite of the material prosperity it describes :
" Dear Sister, — I received yours and am glad your
Houses and every thing go on so much to your satisfac-
tion. I have always wish'd you happy, though sometimes
we have differ'd a little in our opinions. I did all in my
power to comfort poor Humphry, and should have been
glad of his company a little longer, had not his business
called him hence.
" What will become of me time must show ; I can
only say that my present situation with regard to en-
couragement is all that heart can wish, but as all worldly
success is precarious I don't build happiness, or the ex-
122 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
pectation of it, upon present appearances. I have built
upon sandy foundations all my life long. All I know is
that I live at a full thousand pounds a year expense,
and will work hard and do my best to go through withal ;
and if that will not do let those take their lot of blame
and sufferings that fall short of their duty, both towards
me and themselves. Had I been blessed with your pene-
tration and bhnd eye towards fool's pleasures, I had
steer'd my course better, but we are bom with different
Passions and gifts, and I have only to hope that the Great
Giver of All will make better allowance for us than we
can make for one another.
" I could now enter into particulars as my heart finds
itself affected, but what would it all signify ? If I tell you
my wife is weak but good, and never much formed to
humour my Happiness, what can you do to alter her ?
If I complain that Peggy is a sensible good Girl, but
Insolent and proud in her behaviour to me at times, can
you make your arm long enough to box her ears for me
whilst you live at Bath ? And (what has hurt me most
of late) were I to unfold a secret and tell you that I have
detected a sly trick in Molly by a sight I got of one of her
Letters, forsooth, to Mr. Fischer, what could aU your
cleverness do for me there ? and yet I wish for your
Head-piece to catch a little more of the secret, for I
don't choose to be flung under the pretence of Friendship.
I have never suffered that worthy Gentleman ever to be
in their Company since I came to London ; and behold
while I had my eye upon Peggy, the other Slyboots, I
suppose, has all along been the Object. Oh, d — n him,
he must take care how he trips me off the foot of all
happiness.
" I desire, my Dear Sister, you will not impart a
syllable of what you have here, and beUeve me ever yours
most affectionately,
"Thos. Gainsborough.
" December 26, 1775.
" Compliments of this happy season to you and love
to Sally.
" P.S. — She does not suspect I saw the letter."
It is clear from this that Gainsborough's relations
with his women-kind were no more sympathetic in London
MRS. FISCHER (MARY GAINSBOROUGH)
By permission of Mr. Adolph Hirsch
LONDON, 1774-1776 123
than they had been at Bath two or three years earlier, when
he complained to William Jackson of the doings of " these
fine ladies with their tea-drinkings, dancings, and husband-
huntings," and avowed his longing to escape to some
quiet village where he could paint landscape and pass the
rest of his life in quietness and ease. Gainsborough, in
the same letter to Jackson, expressed a fear that with all
their gaieties his girls would fail to find husbands, and it
is curious that with the exception of Fischer, who married
the younger daughter Mary (Molly), the name of no suitor
is mentioned in connection with either of them. Stranger
still is the almost entire absence of any reference to Gains-
borough's daughters in the correspondence of his friends
or in the numerous memoirs of the period. Both
Margaret and Mary were handsome and accomplished
women, and apparently of unblemished reputation, and
they must have been acquainted both in Bath and
London with many of the people eminent in the social,
musical, and dramatic worlds with whom their father
was on intimate terms. Yet I have been able to find
nothing about them anywhere except a few words in
Thicknesse ; a passing mention in Parke of Mary's
marriage to Fischer ; and the reference to Margaret's
illness at Bath in the letter quoted earlier from Palmer
to Garrick.
Of Gainsborough's rapid increase in prosperity, " all
that the heart could wish," there are several indications
in his correspondence within two or three years after his
removal to town. We know that he kept a footman,
who was afraid to venture out into Pall Mall for fear of
being impressed for the sea-service — the only service he
was fit for in the opinion of his master : and that a coach
was included in the Schomberg House establishment is
evident from a letter in which Gainsborough mentions
a journey to Ipswich made by his wife and daughters.
They had been invited thither to stay for a fortnight
with the Kilderbees, with whom the artist and his wife
124 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
had been intimate when they lived at Ipswich. Samuel
Kilderbee, to whose friendship with Gainsborough I
have already referred, lived in a house near Queen Street,
not far from the garden in which Thicknesse was deceived
by the efhgy of Tom Peartree. A man of substance, he
was an attorney who for several years held the post of
Town Clerk of Ipswich ; but the Gainsborough ladies,
fresh from London, were perhaps too conscious of their
own dignity and importance to get on comfortably with
his family, and their stay with the Kilderbees was shorter
than had been intended originally.
" I packed them off," said Gainsborough, " in their
own coach with David on horseback ; and Molly wrote
to me to let me know that they had arrived very safe — •
but somehow or other they seem desirous of returning
rather sooner than the proposed time, as they desire me
to go for them next Tuesday ; the bargain was that I
should fetch them home. I don't know what's the
matter ; either people don't pay them honour enough
for ladies that keep a coach, or else Madam is afraid to
trust me alone in this great town."
Gainsborough was unrepresented at the Academy in
1776, as he had been in the three preceding summers.
But 1776 was by no means a year of idleness, and he
executed, among other commissions, one of a singular
nature for the Society of Arts. It was to paint a portrait
of the Society's first President, Lord Folkestone, father
of the first Earl of Radnor, who had died fifteen years
eariier, in 1761. A full-length portrait by Sir Joshua
Reynolds of the second President, Lord Romney, had
lately come into the Society's possession, and it was
thought fit and proper that a companion portrait of the
first President should be painted to hang by its side.
Early in 1774 a deputation from the Society waited on
Lord Radnor to ask him to lend for the purpose of being
copied the three-quarter-length portrait of his father
that Hudson had painted in 1749. Lord Radnor agreed,
LONDON, 1774-1776 125
and after some negotiations with other artists Nathaniel
Dance, R.A., was asked to paint an enlarged and altered
version of Hudson's work, " a whole-length portrait
drawn in the proper Coronation robes and the same size
as the portrait of Lord Romney." The price of fifty
guineas was agreed upon, and the commission was given
in February 1774, but by the end of the year the work
was not even commenced. Illness and great pressure of
other business were the excuses tendered, and more time
was given, but finally Dance, who throughout appears
to have treated the Society with discourtesy, threw up
the commission.
Lord Radnor had now to be approached again for
permission to allow another artist to make the copy,
and he, after expressing his indignation at the behaviour
of Dance, suggested the employment of Gainsborough,
who, as we have seen, had painted at Bath not long before
the portraits of his lordship and several members of his
family. " Mr. Dance," wrote Lord Radnor from Long-
ford Castle, " has for two summers been in possession
of the picture under a repeated promise of completing
the copy before winter. As Mr. Gainsborough, since
the appointment of Mr. Dance, is settled in London,
perhaps the Society may think him the properest person
to make the copy." Gainsborough was applied to,
and his letter of acceptance is still in the possession of the
Society of Arts :
" Sir, — Agreeable to the obliging order of the Society
for a full-length portrait of the late Lord Folkestone, I
will take particular care to execute it in my best manner,
and to get it done by the beginning of October next. —
I am, Sir, your most obliged and obedient servant,
"Thos. Gainsborough.
"Pall Mall, December 11, I775-"
The copy of Hudson's portrait, to which Gainsborough
added a pair of legs and a fine sky with a distant glimpse
of St. Paul's Cathedral, was delivered at the Adelphi in
126 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
October 1776, and was received with approval. The
artist was informed that the Society was " highly satis-
fied with his masterly performance," and he was re-
quested to mention the remuneration which he expected.
Nothing had been agreed, and Gainsborough asked a
hundred guineas, the price, he said, that he usually re-
ceived for a whole-length portrait. And this, although
double the sum that Dance was to have received, was
paid without demur. The head of this portrait of Lord
Folkestone was engraved by Sherwin, and forms the
frontispiece to the second volume of the Society's Trans-
actions, published in 1784.
CHAPTER VII
THE REVEREND HENRY BATE
The champion of Gainsborough — " A magnificent piece of humanity " —
Helps to found the Morning Post — His influence on journalism —
Defends Mrs. Hartley at Vauxhall — Thrashes the bully — The
procession in Piccadilly — Misreadings of Walpole — The New
Morning Post — Bate engages Mrs. Siddons for Garrick — His art
criticisms in the Morning Post — An apology — Founds the Morning
Herald — Adopts the name of Dudley — Appointed a prebendary
of Ely — Created a baronet — The patron of Morland — His portrait
by Gainsborough in the National Gallery — His notes on Gains-
borough in the Morning Herald.
Before attempting to deal with the events of the year
which witnessed the reappearance of Gainsborough at
the Academy and the commencement of the most brilliant
and fruitful portion of his career, it will be necessary to
say something about the life and journalistic ventures
of that remarkable personage the Reverend Henry Bate,
afterwards Sir Henry Bate-Dudley, whose devotion to
Gainsborough, and constant championship of the artist
in the newspapers with which he was connected, have
long been forgotten. Most of the large amount of new
information in this volume concerning Gainsborough's
work in London is given on the authority of Bate, who is
mentioned as a sitter only in all the previous works on the
artist. There is not a word in one of them concerning
his friendship with Gainsborough, or any allusion to the
notes which he wrote and published for years on Gains-
borough's pictures.
The son of a country clergyman who had his quiver-
ful of sons and daughters. Bate was sent by his father to
Oxford, and was afterwards ordained by Terrick, Bishop
of London. He seems, however, to have been connected
127
128 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
with newspapers from an early period of his life, for he
was only twenty-seven years old when, in 1772, he helped
to found the Morning Post, of which journal he was editor,
except for an interval of two or three months, until he
left it to establish the Morning Herald. Bate was a
man of thews and sinews, " a magnificent piece of
humanity," as Angelo calls him, with undaunted courage
and resolution that never failed him at the most critical
moments. He had many enemies, and doubtless many
failings, but all who knew him in private life seem to agree
in speaking of him as one of the kindest and most hos-
pitable of men. On the other hand he was detested by
Walpole, and disliked by Dr. Johnson, who allowed him
no good quahties but courage. It was Bate's prowess
with his fists, however, which on more than one occasion
brought him into prominence, and is perhaps responsible
for the idea that he was a person of noisy and rowdy
habits. It will be remembered that Leshe, in his life of
Sir Joshua Reynolds, speaks of Bate with a shade of
contempt as " the uproarious clerical editor of the Morn-
ing Post," but Bate in reality was anj^thing but uproarious.
Bernard the actor gives a description of his appear-
ance and manner that seem to fit the man we see in the
full-length by Gainsborough that was exhibited in the
Academy of 1780 and is now owned by Lady Burton.
" Bate," says the actor, "was a very quiet and gentle-
manly man, who always laughed heartily but spoke
seldom. He was built upon the scale of my friend George
Parker, which is to say he had a very clerical appearance.
He looked big, benevolent, and thoughtful, and by a
stranger might easily have been mistaken for a parson
incog." If not altogether intellectual. Bate had some
scholarship, and was endowed with so large a share of
common sense and business aptitude that Garrick en-
gaged Mrs. Siddons solely on the strength of his recom-
mendation.
If Garrick used Bate on occasion Bate did not hesitate
THE REVEREND HENRY BATE 129
to apply for the actor's support in aid of the Morning
Post in the early days when the existence of that journal
was precarious. When Garrick gave up the management
of Drury Lane in 1776 Bate begged him to try to obtain
from the succeeding proprietors the whole or part of the
future advertisements for the Morning Post. " The
object," wrote Bate, " would be considerable to me, and
I think their end would be fully answered in advertising
with us. You hinted some time ago that Linley spoke
something of the playbills being given in common to the
four papers ; if you cannot serve the Morning Post in
particular, favour that plan as much as possible and you
will much oblige me."
Bate was, for his day, a capital journalist, although
many of the anecdotes and paragraphs in the Morning
Post and the Morning Herald are tinged with a coarseness
that would make their appearance impossible in a modern
English newspaper. There is a tradition that Sheridan,
who was a friend of Bate, was responsible for some of
the more daring of these notes. But Bate wrote for a
public that had few or none of the present-day refine-
ments, and was accustomed to hear a spade called a spade
in the frankest fashion, and his comments on men and
things, if sometimes indelicate, were never dull. Taylor,
himself a contemporary journalist of wide experience,
thought that Bate's influence on the newspapers of his
day was on the whole excellent. " There was a sportive
severity in his writings which gave a new character to
the public press, as the newspapers, before the Morning
Post appeared, were generally dull, heavy, and insipid.
It may be said that he was too personal in his strictures
in general, and in his allusions to many characters of his
time ; but it may be said, also, that they were generally
characters of either sex who had rendered themselves
conspicuous for folly, vice, or some prominent absurdity
by which they became proper objects for satirical ani-
madversion. Such effusions of his pen brought him into
I
130 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
hostile collision with some of the persons whom he cen-
sured, but he always manfully supported his character,
and was wholly incapable of degrading concession or
compromising artifice."
He was keenly interested in country life and every
kind of sport ; and in the drama, music, and fine arts.
The writer of the libretto of The Flitch of Bacon, he was
the patron of Shield, the composer of the music for that
work, and was something of a musician himself. He
played the violoncello, an instrument he had studied
under Newby, the principal 'cellist at Drury Lane
Theatre. Parke in his Musical Memoirs recalls a Sunday
evening supper at Bate's house, at the time he was editing
the Morning Herald, and lived in York Buildings,
Buckingham Street. The party was very small, con-
sisting of only Mr. and Mrs. Bate and two or three friends,
one of whom was Shield. The Flitch of Bacon, in the
production of which Bate and Shield had collaborated,
had been played for the first time only a few days before
the supper-party, at which a brace of partridges was one
of the dishes. Mrs. Bate, who presided at this informal
banquet, cut up one of the birds and passed it on a dish
to Shield, asking him to help her by distributing it to
other members of the company. Shield, his mind wholly
engrossed in his music, took the dish without noticing
the request of his hostess, and remarking that she had
served him very liberally, placed it before him and
quickly consumed the entire partridge, to the mingled
amusement and disappointment of the remainder of the
party, who had to be content with one bird between them.
An old acquaintance and admirer of Bate, who wrote
some reminiscences of the parson-editor which were
published soon after his death, gave a Ust of several
distinguished persons whom he had supported and en-
couraged, and declared enthusiastically that he was the
patron of every man of merit who needed or solicited
his assistance.
THE REV. HENRY BATE
(Sir Henry Bate Dudley)
National Gallery
THE REVEREND HENRY BATE 131
" To him the country is in a great measure indebted
for one of its ornaments — Gainsborough. His patronage
of this excellent painter in early life principally con-
tributed to his subsequent success." This estimate of
Bate's biographer is exaggerated, for Gainsborough was
prominent before the foundation of the newspapers in
which his pictures were acclaimed. Yet his debt to Bate
was a large one, for no man ever had a more faithful
friend and supporter than the painter found in the journa-
list. Henry Bate loved Gainsborough as an artist and as
a man, and he lost no chance of furthering his interests
in the Morning Post so long as he had authority, and in
the Morning Herald from the date of its commencement.
And Bate's interest in Gainsborough did not cease with
the artist's death. He did everything possible in the way
of notices and advertisements in the Morning Herald to
help Mrs. Gainsborough to dispose of the pictures and
drawings bequeathed to her by her husband, and at the
second sale at Schomberg House Bate was himself the
purchaser of two or three canvases at high prices. Nor
did he fail, subsequently, to say a good word for
Gainsborough Dupont whenever an opportunity pre-
sented itself ; and he attacked the Academy hangers
furiously in 1790 for daring to place " no higher than the
knee" Dupont's portrait of his famous uncle, whose
death had taken place two years earlier.
When Gainsborough came from Bath to London in
1774 the story of a famous encounter at Vauxhall was
still fresh in the public memory. It was an encounter
in which Bate checked and chastised some fashionable
bullies who were tormenting an unoffending actress, and
thrashed unmercifully a professional prize-fighter dis-
guised as a gentleman who was their paid champion.
This affray, at one of the gayest and most popular places
of public resort, created an extraordinary sensation,
and there are many references to it in the magazines
and newspapers of the time. It was this episode
132 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
that gained for Bate the title of "The Fighting
Parson."
The actress protected by Bate in 1773 was the auburn-
haired Mrs. Hartley, whose grace and beauty had capti-
vated London, despite an inharmonious voice and a
diction so rapid that it was almost inarticulate. Mrs.
Hartley, of whom Garrick said he had never seen a finer
creature ("her make is perfect "), often sat to Sir Joshua
Reynolds. In the year of the disturbance at Vauxhall
he exhibited the portrait of her as A Nymph with Young
Bacchus, which was presented to the National Gallery in
1903 by the late Sir William Agnew. It was originally
in the possession of Lord Carysfort, who saw it while it
was at the Academy and bought it from Sir Joshua for
fifty pounds. Mrs. Hartley's portrait by Reynolds now,
by a curious chance, hangs in the same room at the
National Gallery with the admirable study of her
champion by Gainsborough. More curious is the fact
that Mrs. Hartley and Bate, both of whom lived to old
age, died on the same day in 1824. Bate, who was Mrs.
Hartley's escort on the night when he thrashed the bully,
was at that time engaged to her sister, whom he married
in 1773, a few weeks after the incident at Vauxhall.
I do not know when the acquaintanceship between
Gainsborough and Bate commenced, but probably it
was not until after the summer of 1775, or the editor of
the Morning Post would certainly not have missed the
opportunity of commenting on the robbery of his friend
by the highwaymen, which he reports only in the briefest
fashion in his journal. But whenever the acquaintance
may have begun, Bate had httle opportunity of helping
Gainsborough in the Morning Post until the spring of
1777, when the artist exhibited at the Academy for the
first time since 1772. When the Academy of 1777 was
opened Bate was firmly installed in his position as editor of
the paper, after a succession of violent quarrels among
the proprietors in which he and his following had proved
THE REVEREND HENRY BATE 133
victorious. One of the incidents of these quarrels has
been recorded in a well-known passage in the corre-
spondence of Horace Walpole, in which he describes the
march through Piccadilly of a band of men hired by the
managers of the Morning Post to advertise the paper.
In the catalogue of the Gainsborough Exhibition held
at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1885, F. G. Stephens quotes
this passage in his copious notes about the pictures that
have proved useful to later writers on the artist. But
in this particular instance Stephens made a shp. He
misread Walpole, and his misreading has led one of
Gainsborough's biographers into inextricable confusion
in the attempt to identify the Morning Herald, Bate's
second venture, with a short-lived journal called the
New Morning Post. Stephens, who in the Gainsborough
catalogue devotes considerable space to Bate and his
affairs, says that a characteristic gUmpse of him is con-
tained in the before-mentioned letter by Walpole, which
is addressed to Lady Ossory, and is dated November 13,
1776. This is the passage from Walpole's letter quoted
by Stephens :
" Yesterday, just after I arrived, I heard drums and
trumpets in Piccadilly. I looked out of the window
and saw a procession with streamers flying. At first I
thought it was a press-gang, but seeing the corps so well
dressed, hke Hussars in yellow, with blue waistcoats and
breeches and high caps, I concluded it was some new body
of our allies (Hessian mercenaries) or a regiment newly
raised and with new regimentals for distinction. I was
not totally mistaken, for the Colonel is a new ally. In
short this was a procession set forth by Mr. Bate, Lord
Lyttleton's chaplain and the author of the old Morning
Post, and meant as an appeal to the town against his
antagonist, the new one. I did not perceive it but the
musicians had masks. On their caps was wxitten The
Morning Post and they distributed handbills. I am sure
there were at least between thirty and forty, and this
mummery mus t have cost a great deal of money. Are we
not quite distracted, reprobate, absurd, beyond all people
134 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
that ever lived ? The new Morning Post, I am told, for
I never take in either, exceeds all the most outrageous
Bilhngsgate that ever was heard."
Commenting on this passage Stephens says, " The new
Morning Post was of course the Morning Herald." It
was, of course, nothing of the kind, for Bate did not found
the Morning Herald until 1780, four years later. But,
apart from this, it is singular that so observant a man as
Stephens should have failed to understand what Walpole
makes so clear, that the procession was not in favour of
the New Morning Post but an appeal against it — " set
forth," as Walpole says, " by Mr. Bate, author of the
old Morning Post."
The story of the New Morning Post is worth recalling,
for it deals with a forgotten episode in the history of a
great London newspaper — the first newspaper that cham-
pioned Gainsborough. In the various histories of jour-
nalism there is no mention of the New Morning Post,
which was founded by some of the partners in the ori-
ginal Morning Post who had seceded from the paper and
claimed its title. The seceders, in the first instance,
brought out another Morning Post, which was published
by G. Corral, on November 9, 1776, and with the idea
of giving it a respectable appearance of age, was num-
bered 2004. The original Morning Post, No. 1262, was
published as usual on the same day by R. Bell, and for
a short time two rival but dissimilar Morning Posts were
issued from different offices. The Corral party in the
first issue of their version stated that the licentiousness
of the old Morning Post had induced them to found
another Morning Post, " projected and conducted on
very different and opposite principles."
An order from the Court of Chancery, granted on the
apphcation of Bate and his two partners, the Rev. Dr.
Trusler and Mr. R. Bell, soon cut short the career of the
second Morning Post, which Corral reissued immedi-
ately under the title of the New Morning Post. The
THE REVEREND HENRY BATE 135
proprietors of this journal, which is the one Stephens
confused with the Morning Herald, lost no time in pro-
claiming that the title had been altered only " that it
may not be mistaken for the scandalous print which has
hitherto pestered the pubhc." A day or two later they
complain bitterly of the Piccadilly procession seen by
Walpole, and protest against the methods of advertising
employed by Bate, who " instead of circulating his jour-
nal in the usual manner of business, with the other papers,
picked up a lot of vagabonds, clothed them like antics,
and sent them blowing horns about the town to the
annoyance of every neighbourhood in which they were
not silenced as a common nuisance."
However, Bate's methods proved efficacious. The
new venture was unable to compete with the original
Morning Post, which the parson-editor conducted suc-
cessfully for three or four years afterwards. His rule,
though it led to prosperity, was not peaceful, and he was
obliged to fight several duels in defending statements
that appeared in his paper. In one of these duels his
antagonist was a former contributor, an Irishman named
Barlow, who, unable to obtain satisfaction at the office
of the paper, wrote to the editor telling him that he was
" a cowardly poltroon and a rascal " ; but in challenging
Mr. Bate to fight with any weapons was careful to add
" boxing excepted." The editor of the Morning Post,
nothing loth, agreed to pistols, and the meeting took place
in Hyde Park at six in the morning, with no other result
than a shght injury to Bate's hand caused by the burst-
ing of his weapon.
The Morning Herald was estabUshed in 1780, when
Bate quarrelled with his co-proprietors of the Morning
Post about a libel on the Duke of Richmond. The new
journal appears to have been immediately successful.
Only a week after the publication of the first number.
Bate, its editor and sole proprietor, claimed that the
Morning Herald was already as superior to the Morning
136 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
Post in point of sale " as we flatter ourselves it is and
ever will be in point of conduct." Three weeks later he
says that the sale of his paper is more extensive than
that of the Morning Post ever was, and offers to prove
his assertion any day at the oflice where the copies were
stamped for the then existing newspaper tax. The two
papers at this time were full of mutual recriminations,
but in spite of the success of the Morning Herald the laugh
at first was against Bate, who was sentenced to twelve
months' imprisonment for the libel on the Duke of Rich-
mond which had appeared in the Morning Post while
he was still editing that journal. Part of this he served
and was then released unconditionally, after declining
to make any terms with an intermediary sent by the
Duke to the prison. Soon afterwards it was the turn of
the Morning Herald to triumph, for Mr. Jackman, the
editor of the Morning Post, was indicted for publishing
a libel on the Reverend Henry Bate, editor of the Morn-
ing Herald, and sentenced to three months' imprisonment
and to pay a fine of a hundred pounds.
In an earlier paragraph I have referred to the en-
gagement of Mrs. Siddons by Garrick on the strength of
Bate's report of her acting at Cheltenham. The memoirs
of Mrs. Siddons appear to contradict this, as according
to her biographer Campbell, she said that Garrick sent
the actor, King, to see her playing in The Fair Penitent,
and through King, engaged her at five pounds a week
for Drury Lane. Perhaps Mrs. Siddons, who was old
when she wrote her memoirs, had forgotten the par-
ticulars of the engagements of her youth, for the
following letters, which are not published in the corre-
spondence of Garrick, prove conclusively that Bate was
the original envoy of the actor. The first letter is
written by Garrick from his house at Hampton on July
31. 1775 :
" Dear Bate, — If you pass by Cheltenham on your
way to Worcester I wish you would see an actress there, a
THE REVEREND HENRY BATE 137
Mrs. Siddons ; she has a desire, I hear, to try her fortune
with us ; if she seems in your eyes worthy of being trans-
planted pray desire to know upon what conditions she
would make the trial and I will write to her the post
after I have received your letter. Pay our compliments
to your Lady and accept our warmest wishes for an
agreeable journey and safe return to London. — Yours,
my dear sir, most sincerely,
" David Garrick."
Bate made a favourable report upon the abilities of
Mrs. Siddons, and Garrick wrote to him as follows from
Hampton on the 15th of August :
" Dear Bate, — Ten thousand thanks for your very
clear, agreeable and friendly letter ; it pleased me
much, and whoever calls it a jargon of uninteUigible
stuff should be knocked down if I were near him. I
must desire you to assure the lady with my best com-
pliments that she may depend upon any reasonable and
friendly encouragement in my power; and at the same
time you must intimate to the husband that he must
be satisfied with the state of life to which it has pleased
heaven to call her. You see how much I think myself
obHged by your kind offices by the flattering quotations
I make from your own hook (Garrick is referring to the
fact that Bate is in orders). ... If she has merit, and I
am sure by your letter she must have, and will be governed
by me, I will make her theatrical fortune ; if any lady
begins to play us tricks I will immediately play off my
masked battery of Siddons against her. I should be glad
to know her cast of parts, or rather what parts she has
done and in what she likes herself best — ^tnose I would
like to have marked. . . . Pray let me hear from you
again in answer to this. I make no compliments or
excuses to you for the trouble I give you because I feel
by myself that you take pleasure in obhging me. — I am
most sincerely yours,
"David Garrick.
" Mrs. Garrick joins with me in every good wish for
you and your Lady."
138 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
Although Bate had no opportunity of writing about
the work of Gainsborough until 1777, he had always made
it a rule to publish reviews of the Academy Exhibition in
the Morning Post, as he did afterwards in the Morning
Herald. The first year in which notices of the Royal
Academy appeared in the Morning Post was 1773, when
the tone of the criticisms was so severe that a protest
was made on behalf of the younger men, some of whom
alleged that they had been treated with injustice. In
the following year, in a prefatory note to the review of
the Exhibition of 1774, Bate admitted the unnecessary
harshness of the earlier criticisms. Replying to the
protest he said :
" The Editor of the Morning Post is so well convinced
of the truth and justice of the foregoing remarks that he
hopes he shall stand excused if he leaves the public to
judge a little more for themselves. Anything, however,
glaringly absurd will be taken notice of and properly
reprehended by the conductors of this paper. The fol-
lowing pictures in the exhibition of the Royal Academy
in Pall Mall are among the number of the best, and par-
ticularly demand the attention of the spectator."
This was followed by a list of the selected works with
the names of the painters, and in some cases with a few
lines of description.
The Morning Herald was for many years under the
control of its original proprietor and editor, who, how-
ever, remained in orders all his life. He bought the
advowson of a valuable living in Essex, which proved to
be a most unfortunate bargain, and died Rector of
Willingham in Cambridgeshire, and a Prebendary of
Ely. Soon after the foundation of the Morning Herald
Bate inherited some property conditionally upon his
adoption of the name of Dudley, and as Bate-Dudley
henceforth he was known. But for the sake of avoiding
the possibility of confusion I have thought it best to
refer to him always by his original name, and in the pages
THE REVEREND HENRY BATE 139
of this book he is mentioned throughout as Bate. He
maintained during his life the reputation for courage
and daring gained in his youth, and as a magistrate was
perhaps unequalled for his enterprise and determination.
Highwaymen and malefactors of other kinds did not
flourish in the portions of Essex administered by the
Reverend Henry Bate, who did not scruple on occasion
to hunt down offenders in person and arrest them with
his own strong hands. Angelo, in his memoirs, tells us
how this remarkable cleric on one occasion broke in upon
a gathering of armed poachers, and by forcibly depriving
the ringleader of his gun cowed the remainder of the
party.
Another glimpse of him in the performance of the
active duties of a magistrate is given in a newspaper
paragraph of May 1802, when he was in his fifty-
seventh year :
" On Saturday morning was brought in a Post Chaise
from Northampton and safely lodged in Chelmsford
Gaol (by the Rev. H. Bate-Dudley, attended by Mr.
Purnell, the Keeper thereof) Stephen Lee, the last sur-
viving freebooter of a gang of gipsies, who on the 21st
of December 1795 forcibly entered the dwelling-house
of Farmer Grout, near Bishops Stortford."
In 1813 a baronetcy was conferred on Bate by the Prince
Regent, and three years later, when he had passed his
seventieth birthday, a riot at Ely, which was really a
battle in miniature, gave him another chance of earning
distinction. For his services in this affray he was pre-
sented by the Lord-Lieutenant and magistrates of the
county with a silver vase modelled on an antique brought
from Rome by Sir WiUiam Hamilton. He died in 1824
at Cheltenham, the town in which he had engaged Mrs.
Siddons for Garrick nearly half a century before. His
widow, the sister of Mrs. Hartley, and " one of the most
amiable ladies in existence," survived him for several
140 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
years. He was the patron not only of Gainsborough
but of George Morland, whose picture, The Inside of a
Stable, one of the finest works of that gifted but dissi-
pated artist, he purchased when it was exhibited at the
Royal Academy of 1791. Although there appears to be
no record of any acquaintanceship between the two
painters befriended by Bate there is reason to think that
Gainsborough and Morland may have collaborated in
one instance. Robins the auctioneer sold in 1805, " A
charming Landscape with Cottage by Gainsborough.
The Figures and Cattle by Morland, being the only joint
production of these two unrivalled Masters." Bate's
nephew, Mr. T. Birch Wolfe, presented The Inside of a
Stable to the National Gallery in 1877, and in the fol-
lowing year added to his gift the line portrait of Bate
by Gainsborough, which now hangs in Room XV at
Trafalgar Square.
To Sir Henry Bate-Dudley, as Bate is known in
history, we owe more information about Gainsborough
than has come down to us through any other person
or persons ; but the existence of this information has
hitherto been unsuspected, as it was hidden in forgotten
newspapers. Sir Henry's notes, fortunately, deal prin-
cipally with Gainsborough's professional life in London.
The later years of that life, although in some respects
the most interesting and productive portions of his
career, are barely mentioned in any of the previous bio-
graphies because their writers were practically destitute
of material. Gainsborough's acquaintances, Thicknesse
and Jackson, tell us nothing about this time, but Bate's
record in the Morning Herald is fairly constant and inti-
mate, and occasionally extremely full. All that he has
to say about the great artist to whom he was so deeply
attached will be found in the following chapters.
CHAPTER VIII
LONDON, I777-I779
Painting at Bath again — " Daubing away " — Negotiations with the
Academy — Gainsborough exhibits once more- — His pictures wel-
comed — A comparison with Sir Joshua — The Duke of Cumberland
— Pictures badly hung — The portrait of the Hon. Mrs. Graham —
More highwaymen — Death of Mrs. Graham — An inconsolable
husband — The famous portrait hidden for fifty years — John
Astley and Schomberg House — The Academy of 1778 — No por-
trait of the Duchess of Devonshire — Walpole mistaken ? — " Her
Grace is too hard for me " — New light on the Devonshire legend —
Gainsborough the painter of the demi-monde — " Dolly the Tall '" —
Reproached for want of finish— Defended by Bate — Gainsborough
the Apollo of the Academy — The Sisters Ramus.
Gainsborough was back again in Bath in the spring of
1777, as we know by a letter written from that city on
March 21st, and addressed by him to the Hon. Thomas
Stratford, second son of Lord Baltinglass, afterwards
Earl of Aldborough. He describes himself as " daubing
away for the Exhibition " with all his might, and says
that he has painted three portraits; as well as two
large landscapes, " the best I ever did, and probably
will be the best I shall ever live to do." Gainsborough
promises Mr. Thomas Stratford that he will touch up
certain works for him when he comes to town, but
says that at the moment his hands are full, as the pic-
tures for the Exhibition must be packed up and de-
spatched in the course of the following week. Why he
should have worked with such energy in 1777 for the Ex-
hibition that he had neglected during the four preceding
years is a question which cannot now be answered, but
it may have been connected with some negotiations with
the Royal Academy of which I shall speak presently.
Gainsborough, who appears to have visited Bath to
141
142 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
execute some commissions, had the good fortune to
meet there his friend Henderson the actor, of whom he
painted another portrait, perhaps the one presented to
Ireland. " I hope too that Gainsborough will let you
have my head," wrote Henderson from Bath to Ireland
in London. " Don't you think it's a very fine like-
ness ? "
Judging by the minutes of the Council of the Royal
Academy in March and April 1777 Gainsborough appears
to have desired some privilege, or to have attempted to
make conditions, before sending his pictures to the Ex-
hibition in which he had been unrepresented since 1772.
In the minutes of the Council meeting of March 25,
1777, I found the following : " Read, a letter from
Thomas Gainsborough, Esq. Mr. N. Dance having
offered, Resolved that Mr. Dance be desired to wait
on Mr. Gainsborough and explain to him the reason why
his request cannot be complied with." Nathaniel Dance,
it will be remembered, was the painter who with Gains-
borough had refused to send any pictures to the Academy
of 1773. A letter was sent to the Council by Gains-
borough on the 31st of March, and on the 13th of April
there is another entry in the minutes. " Read Mr. Gains-
borough's request. Resolved that it be left to the Com-
mittee to do as they think proper." The Committee
referred to was the Hanging Committee, and it may be
that they agreed to grant Gainsborough's request, what-
ever it was, in order to secure again for the Exhibition
the work of so brilliant an artist. Gainsborough in any
case returned to the Academy. By the press and by
the public at large his reception was most flattering,
but the acclamation only served to mark still more
strongly the rivalry between himself and Sir Joshua
Reynolds, who contributed thirteen canvases to the
Academy of 1777.
The pictures sent by Gainsborough from his studio
in Pall Mall included full-length portraits of the Duke
LONDON, 1777-1779 143
and Duchess of Cumberland ; of Abel, the musician who
was one of the party attacked by highwaymen two
years earher ; of Lord Gage, and of a lady of whom I shall
speak again. In addition to these he showed a portrait
group of two gentlemen whom no one has identified
and of whom the critics of the day say nothing, and a
landscape which moved Walpole to extravagant praise.
With one exception the critics were all attracted by the
artist's work. The dissonant note was sounded by the
Gazetteer, whose representative declared that " were it
not for Sir Joshua and Mr. Loutherbourg the present Ex-
hibition would be the meanest collection of pictures ever
seen in this metropolis." But the more influential jour-
nals welcomed the return of the famous painter, who
had been absent all too long. " We are glad," said the
Public Advertiser, " to see Mr. Gainsborough once more
submitting his work to public inspection, which cannot
fail to add to the entertainment of the town as well as
to the reputation and emolument of the artist. 'Tis
hard to say in which branch of the art Mr. Gainsborough
most excels, landscape or portrait painting. Let the con-
noisseurs carefully examine the portrait of Mr. Abel,
No. 135, or the large landscape, No. 136, and then deter-
mine — if they can ! "
The inevitable comparison with Reynolds was made
by the Morning Chronicle, which, after stating that the
exhibition is enriched by the paintings of Gainsborough,
an artist who is a most valuable acquisition to any Society
that holds exhibitions, goes on to say that his portraiture
places him on a level with those who have no superiors
in England but Sir Joshua Reynolds, and that he treads
so close on the heels of the chief of that science that it is
not always evident that Sir Joshua has the best of it.
" Mr. Gainsborough, as a landscape painter, is one of the
first living — as a portrait painter he is a formidable com-
petitor with the ablest." But the critic draws attention
again to that tendency towards purple in the flesh tints,
144 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
for which the artist had been reproved in earlier years,
and expresses the opinion that his portrait of the Duke
of Cumberland is somewhat inferior to the one painted
by the President. Sir Joshua's portraits of the Duke
and Duchess of Cumberland had been exhibited four
years earher, at the Academy of 1773.
The Duke of Cumberland, whose portrait Gainsborough
showed in 1777, together with that of the Duchess — ^the
fascinating Mrs. Horton — was a brother of the King.
He was a dull, stupid man, and his intrigue a few years
earlier with Lady Grosvenor had filled the country with
scandalous gossip and compelled the ducal co-respondent
to pay ten thousand pounds as damages to Sir Richard
Grosvenor. His sittings must have amused and at the
same time annoyed the witty Gainsborough, who seems
to have been more successful than Sir Joshua in managing
the Duke, as both he and his wife were painted again in
the studio at Schomberg House. We know how awk-
wardly the Duke behaved at Leicester Square when the
President was painting the Duchess. He had passed
some time stumbhng over easels and chairs, and swearing
and making himself generally objectionable when his
wife hinted that he ought to speak to Sir Joshua. " Say
something," she whispered, " say something," and the
Duke, thus spurred into politeness, glanced at the canvas
upon which his wife's face was already sketched in, and
stammered out, " What, eh ! so you always begin with
the head, do you ? "
It is in his notice in the Morning Post of the Academy
Exhibition of 1777 that Bate speaks for the first time of
the artist of whom he was to be henceforth the most con-
sistent and powerful supporter. His first review of
Gainsborough was characteristic of those that were to
follow in succeeding years in the columns of the Morning
Post and the Morning Herald. Ignoring Reynolds for
the time, he heads his opening notice of the Academy
in large capitals, " Thomas Gainsborough, RA." and
LONDON, 1777-1779 145
announces that " As the pencil of this gentleman has
evidently entitled him to this distinction we have im-
partially placed him at the head of the artists we are
about to review." The notice, with the titles of the
pictures displayed in a manner calculated at once to
attract the eye, praises the Cumberlands, says that Abel's
is the finest modern portrait the writer remembers to
have seen, and describes Gainsborough's landscape as a
masterpiece, " but view'd to every possible disadvantage
from the situation in which the directors have thought
proper to place it."
This point of bad hanging is one upon which Bate
harps in almost all his notices of Gainsborough at the
Academy, and it is impossible to help thinking that the
comments must have been inspired sometimes by the
artist himself. The desire to have his work well placed
in an exhibition is common to every painter, but Gains-
borough appears to have been exceptionally fastidious,
and perhaps a little selfish, in this matter. Although
he was at times unfairly treated, it is not likely that all
the complaints regarding the positions allotted to his
canvases were justified. In fact, one correspondent,
signing himself " A Delletante," writes to the Morning
Post about the very picture of Gainsborough's which
Bate mentions as unfairly placed, and says that so large
a landscape never ought to have been placed upon the
line at all. He complains, too, that all the good positions
in the Exhibition are monopolised by Reynolds, Gains-
borough, West, and one or two others. Gainsborough's
landscape, which Walpole thought looked so fine despite
its alleged bad position on the walls, has not, I think,
been identified, but its composition included " lucid
water," a broken bank, and a red cow.
Bate's first criticism of Gainsborough, although ex-
tremely eulogistic, is not remarkable except for one thing.
I have already pointed out that Gainsborough's contri-
butions to the Academy of this year included a fuU-
K
146 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
length Portrait of a Lady, No. 133. This portrait has
been identified by no one, not even by the indefatigable
Mr. Algernon Graves.
The notice in the Morning Post of 1777 makes it clear
beyond dispute that the Portrait of a Lady, No. 133,
was none other than the superb full-length of the Hon.
Mrs. Graham, the portrait that is one of the glories of
the National Gallery at Edinburgh, from whence it may
never be removed upon any condition. It is described
by Bate as " A beautiful whole-length of Mrs. Graham,
sister to the Duchess of Atholl, the drawing of which is
correct and masterly, the colouring soft, and the drapery
flowing and easy." The editor of the Morning Post was
not the only person who noticed and admired the treat-
ment of the lady's robes in this portrait. A correspon-
dent of the London Chronicle holds the picture up as an
example, and says that Gainsborough is superior to all
his fellows as a painter of drapery ; which, as we know,
was executed by his own hands and not by those of
assistants. The critic of the Morning Chronicle was
charmed with the portrait of Mrs. Graham, and ranked
it even above that of Abel. He could not, however,
identify the original, nor could a writer in the General
Advertiser, whose admiration for Gainsborough's anony-
mous sitter knew no bounds. " Portrait of a lady," he
said, "rather of a divinity ! From the sweetness of the
face, and the elegance of the figure the spectator is
tempted to exclaim with Otway :
' There's in you all that we believe of Heaven ;
Amazing brightness, purity, and truth,
Eternal joy, and everlasting love.' "
This portrait, which some regard as the painter's
masterpiece, and is famous ahke for its artistic qualities
and the romantic story connected with it, represents
Mary, second daughter of the ninth Lord Cathcart. She
became the wife, when only seventeen, of Thomas
THE HON. MRS. GRAHAM
Xational Gallery of Scotland
LONDON, 1777-1779 147
Graham of Balgowan, afterwards Lord Lynedoch. The
wedding was on the 26th of December 1774, and on the
same day the bride's elder sister was married to the Duke
of Atholl. There is a tradition that Mrs. Graham's
portrait was painted during her honeymoon, and this
may have been the case, as according to The Scots Maga-
zine the sisters were married in London, and it is known
that they spent some time in town not long after the
wedding. WTiile in London at this time Graham had
an opportunity of displaying that determined courage
of which there were so many conspicuous examples in
his military career. He was escorting his beautiful
young wife and her sister the Duchess to a party in
Grosvenor Square, when, in Park Lane, two footpads
seized the horses' heads while a third, pistol in hand,
opened the coach door and demanded the money and
jewels of the company. Unfortunately for the thieves
Thomas Graham was one of the last persons in the world
to be robbed unresistingly. When the door was opened
he was sitting in the far side of the coach, but he sprang
instantly across the two ladies, was on the man before
he could fire his pistol, and fell into the road with the
footpad beneath him. The men who had stopped the
horses ran away, the one on the ground was handed over
to the watch, and Graham and his charges went on to
Grosvenor Square, where it is said that he was obliged
to keep as much as possible behind the skirts of his wife
and her sister to conceal his muddy shoes and stockings.
I am indebted for most of these particulars to Lord
Lynedoch's biographers, Mr. John Murray Graham and
Colonel Delavoye, who describe Mrs. Graham as not only
elegant and accomplished but very attentive to her house-
hold duties, and with a charm of manner that appealed
to all who approached her. She was adored by her
husband, who was her constant companion till the day
of her death.
They were ideally happy until, in 1791, Mrs. Graham's
148 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
health showed signs of failing. The climate — whether
of Scotland or England — was too harsh for her, and after
a visit to the Bristol Hot-\\'ells had been tried in vain
her husband took her as a last hope to the south of
France, where, in spite of the tenderest care, she died on
ship-board off Hyeres, in July 1792. Graham brought
her body home, but the agonies and indignities endured
upon the journey intensified the grief that ultimately
almost deprived him of his reason. Immediately after
his wife's death he wrote home to Scotland that he should
travel by canal to Toulouse and thence down the Garonne
to Bordeaux, and he carried out his intention. But
France was then in the throes of revolution, and at
Toulouse he was stopped by a drunken mob of municipal
guards and volunteers, who refused to let the cofftn pass
until they had assured themselves that it contained
nothing contraband. And the husband, already frantic
with despair, saw the coffin torn open and his wife's body
exposed.
For some time after his return to England Graham
could do nothing. The associations of his Scottish seat
at Balgowan were too painful to be endured. Nor could
he for the same reason live in Leicestershire, where at
Brooksby he had a house in which he and his wife had
spent many happy days. " He wandered aimlessly about
the country," says Colonel Delavoye, " burdened by a
sorrow that he could not overcome."
At last he made up his mind to seek forgetfulness
amid the risk and danger of active service. England
was at this time at war with France, and Graham, begin-
ning military hfe as a volunteer at the age of forty-four,
fought bravely everywhere. He was at Toulon when
Bonaparte drove out the English ; was aide-de-camp to
Sir John Moore when that fine soldier made his last
stand at Corunna ; and later, as one of Wellington's
generals, was in command of the army that defeated
Victor at Barossa. Graham's military prowess brought
LONDON, 1777-1779 149
him well-deserved honours, and he died a Peer and a
General in the British army. Lord Lynedoch, as he is
known to-day, lived until he was ninety-five, but in all
the years that elapsed between his wife's death and his
own he could never bear to look at the portrait by Gains-
borough. The portrait had been lost to sight for more
than half a century when the old soldier died in 1843,
and no one knew what had become of it. Graham had
sent it, before he volunteered for active service, to a
warehouse in London. There the portrait had remained
packed in a case and stored away " in the back room
of a shop," whose proprietor, on hearing of the death
of Lord Lynedoch, communicated with his heir. Since
1859 the portrait of Mrs. Graham has been in the
National Gallery of Scotland, to which it was bequeathed
by Mr. Robert Graham of Redgorton.
In the same year, 1777, in which he exhibited the
portrait of Mrs. Graham at the Royal Academy, Gains-
borough lost his neighbour, John Astley the painter, and
the landlord of Schomberg House, of which he occupied
the central portion. Astley who like most of the artists
of that day, was something of a collector, disposed before
leaving the house of what the auctioneers described as
the " noble, superb and truly capital pictures " by
Italian, French and Flemish masters which he had
gathered together. He also gave notice in a grandilo-
quent advertisement of his wish to let the " capital and
elegant mansion, situated in the most eligible part of
Pall Mall. St. James's Park, with the noble objects in
its environs, the prospect enriched and bounded by the
Surrey Hills, seem appendages to the above premises."
In the last paragraph of his advertisement Astley was
referring to the view obtainable from the " attic story "
already mentioned, which he himself had added to the
central portion of Schomberg House. The " attic story,"
with its ancient lead-covered dome and its great window
with semi-circular top looking south, remains much as it
150 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
was ; and the view, of which Astley might well boast, is
still encnanting. Schomberg House, as I have explained
in a previous chapter, is used by part of the War Office
staff, and the apartment on the roof is the sitting-room
of the fortunate caretaker of the building, who from his
fireside can see the towers of Westminster rising above
the rich foliage of the trees in St. James's Park and the
gardens of Marlborough House, and the Crystal Palace
breaking the long line of the Surrey hills that bound
the horizon.
In 1778 the name of the Duchess of Devonshire is for
the first time connected with that of Gainsborough by
the modern biographers of the painter. Fulcher asserts
that a portrait of the Duchess was exhibited at the
Academy in this year, and his statement, which is based
on that of Horace Walpole, has been accepted by most
of the writers who have followed him. Walpole, in his
Academy Catalogue of 1778, has written in ink against
one of the Gainsboroughs, No. iii, Portrait of a Lady,
the note, " Duchess of Devonshire ; very bad and washy,"
and this appears to be the only evidence that a portrait
of the Duchess was exhibited. At first sight Walpole's
note seems incontrovertible, as he knew the Duchess
and could not have mistaken her portrait, but contem-
porary descriptions of the Exhibition point to the con-
clusion that his statement is inaccurate.
Gainsborough, after obtaining two separate extensions
of time from the Academy Council, sent to the Exhibition
of 1778 two landscapes and eleven portraits. Of these
portraits the first entered in the catalogue is No. iii,
which Fulcher, after reading Walpole's note, naturally
concluded to be that of the Duchess of Devonshire. But
it so happens that in 1778 the newspaper comments and
criticisms on the Academy Exhibition were exceptionally
numerous and lengthy, and great attention was given by
the journalists of the time to Gainsborough's pictures in
particular. Some of his portraits are described, and the
LONDON, 1777-1779 151
originals named, but there is not the remotest suggestion
anywhere that the Duchess figured among his sitters.
The Duchess of Devonshire, in 1778, was in the first
freshness of that remarkable beauty which was the theme
of admiration not only in London, but in every part of
the kingdom. The wife of a nobleman of the highest
rank and great wealth, she occupied a position in society
to which our times shows no parallel outside the circle
of Royalty, and it is incredible that a full-length
portrait of this great lady, painted by an artist whose
achievements everyone was discussing, could have
escaped the notice of the journalists who described the
Exhibition at the Royal Academy. Least of all could it
have escaped the attention of Bate, who wrote in the
Morning Post a special article on Gainsborough's pic-
tures, with their titles displayed at the head of the
column. For Bate himself was a worshipper at the
shrine of the Duchess, and when, not long afterwards, he
founded the Morning Herald, he printed in the first
number an ode in which she was hailed as the most
distinguished beauty of the time. There is another
reason for thinking that Gainsborough painted no por-
trait of her Grace as early as 1778, except, of course,
the study that he made when she was a child. In 1782,
more than four years after the opening of the Exhibition
about which I am writing. Bate published in the Morning
Herald some lines addressed to " Mr. Gainsborough."
They were wTitten after seeing a portrait of the Duchess
of Devonshire as Cynthia, shown by Mrs. Cosway at the
Academy of 1782, and suggest that the Duchess had not
then been painted by Gainsborough, who is urged by the
poet to seek in her a subject worthy of his brush :
" O Gainsboro' ! thou whose genius soars so high,
Wild as an eagle in an unknown sky,
To Devon turn 1 — thy pencil there shall find,
A subject equal to thy happy mind !
Amidst thy fairest scenes, thy brightest dyes,
Like young Aurora let the Beauty rise 1 "
152 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
A newspaper criticism of the Academy of 1783, to which
I shall refer in due course, strengthens still further the
case against Walpole, whose mistake, if it be one, is in-
explicable except on the ground that the entries so
carefully WTitten in ink in his catalogues were occasion-
ally made long after the dates of the exhibitions to which
they refer. That entries were sometimes so made can
be proved from the catalogues themselves, and as the
Duchess of Devonshire was painted by many artists, it
would have been easy for Walpole to make a slip. In
the case of the particular entry of 1778 now under dis-
cussion he has written " Ds. Devon " in faint pencil on
the left side of the entry No. iii, Portrait of a Lady,
and on the right the inscription in ink which I have
already given.
Fulcher, writing in 1856 about the portrait which he
supposed was exhibited in 1778, tacks on to his nar-
rative a romantic quotation from Allan Cunningham,
written in 1829 :
" The dazzling beauty of the Duchess and the sense
which he (Gainsborough) entertained of the charms of
her looks and conversation took away that readiness of
hand and hasty happiness of touch which belonged to him
in his ordinary moments. The picture was so little to
his satisfaction that he refused to send it to Chatsworth.
Drawing his wet pencil across a mouth which all who
saw it thought exquisitely lovely, he said, ' Her Grace
is too hard for me.' The picture was, I believe, de-
stroyed."
In this instance, as in that of the Tom Peartree, it is
instructive to trace the development of a Gainsborough
legend which has been repeated by writer after writer
until everybody believes it to be true. Fulcher attaches
the anecdote to the Academy Exhibition of 1778, but
Cunningham, to do him justice, did not attribute it to
1778 or any other year. He knew, in fact, nothing about
it, for he had simply borrowed the anecdote without
LONDON, 1777-1779 153
acknowledgment from our old friend Thicknesse, adding
some embroidery of his own about Chatsworth and the
exquisite loveliness of the Duchess's mouth.
Thicknesse told the story in the first place in an
article composed of gossip about Gainsborough which
appeared in the St. James's Chronicle a few days after
the painter's death in 1788.
" When," he said, " a certain Duchess not remarkable
for want of beauty, sent to know why her picture was
not sent home, though it was nearly finished and ex-
quisitely painted at full length, Gainsborough took his
background brush, made her Grace's portrait blush brown,
and sent her word that her Grace's face was too hard
for him, and this was done at a time when a hundred
guineas would not have been inconvenient to him."
The article in the St. James's Chronicle did not escape
the eye of Gainsborough's faithful friend and champion,
who ridiculed the story of the Duchess. Bate, at the
time the article was pubhshed, had been for many years
in close touch with Gainsborough, always deeply inter-
ested in watching the progress of his pictures and con-
stantly writing about them. He replied to Thicknesse
at once, and in a note in the Morning Herald gave a point-
blank contradiction to all his stories about Gains-
borough.
" A \mter in a very respectable paper of Saturday
has detailed what he calls Anecdotes of Mr. Gainsborough.
We deny the authenticity of every part except that
which relates to the wife of the author and himself, and
of that we know nothing. Mr. Gainsborough never
obliterated any part of the Duchess of Devonshire's por-
trait, if the allusion be at her Grace, which we judge it
is. The remark which the writer gives to Mr. Gains-
borough is too stupid ever to have passed his lips."
Bate's comments upon the other anecdotes by Thick-
nesse are illuminating, but these belong to a different
154 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
period of^Gainsborough's history, and will be referred to
in their proper place.
It is clear from the newspaper comments on the
Academy of 1778 that most of the ladies whose portraits
were exhibited by Gainsborough were not exactly of
the first rank in society — certainly not Duchesses.
The Morning Chronicle says in its review of the ex-
hibition :
" Mr. Gainsborough has thirteen pieces, eleven por-
traits and two landscapes. It should appear from this
artist's female portraits that he is a favourite among
the demi-reps. He has, it is plain, been visited by Miss
Dalrymple, Clara Haywood, and another well-known
character of the same stamp. The likenesses in the
three pictures are remarkably strong, and as the real
faces of the ladies we have mentioned have not been
seen by the world for many a year, they were very fit
subjects for Mr. Gainsborough's pencil, since he is rather
apt to put that sort of complexion upon the counte-
nances of his female portraits which is laughingly de-
scribed in The School for Scandal as ' coming in the
morning and going away at night,' than to blend
what is, properly speaking, Nature's own red and
white."
Equally pointed is Bate's comment on the ladies
painted by his friend. " The portraits which he has
exhibited on this occasion consist chiefly of filles de joie,
and are all admirable hkenesses. No. 114 particularly
being that of the beautiful Mrs. E." The "beautiful
Mrs. E." was Mrs. ElHott, one of the most notorious
demi-mondaines of the time, known everywhere, and
satirised constantly in contemporary journals, as " Dolly
the Tall." Born Grace Dalr^^mple, she was the daughter
of a member of a reputable Scottish family. She was
married when very young to a physician afterwards well
known as Sir John Elliott, from whom she was divorced.
Mrs. Elliott was frequently referred to as Miss Dahymple.
The Morning Chronicle mentions her thus ; and the
LONDON, 1777-1779 155
General Evening Post in its notice of the Academy of this
year describes No. 114 as :
" A striking and beautiful portrait of an unfortunate
lady (Miss Da — pie) of whom we may say with Pope :
' If to her share some female errors fall
Look on her face and you'll forget them all.'
The carnations in this portrait appear with inexpressible
delicacy, united with the utmost force and truth ; and
the touch of the artist is uncommonly exquisite. The
blue tint, however, is too predominant in the hair, but
we surely ought to forgive this seeming imperfection
from the inexpressible sensibility that animates the whole
figure."
^liss Dalrymple, whose adventures in Paris during the
Reign of Terror are described in her Journal of my Life
during the French Revolution, was the aunt of Frances,
Lady Shelley, as that lady records in a singular passage
in her Diary. Writing of her girlhood, she says :
" One day, it must have been in 1803, I came back
unexpectedly to my mother's sick room and saw, sitting
at her bedside, the most beautiful woman I had ever
beheld. She was dressed in the indecent style of the
French Republican period. Tears were rolling down her
cheeks ; this heightened her beauty without defacing the
rouge which had been artistically applied. When she
saw me she rose to her feet, rushed towards me, and
cried impulsively, ' Do let me kiss my darling niece.'
. . . This was the first and only time I saw my mother's
unhappy sister, Grace Dalrymple Elliott. Of course, I
knew nothing then of my aunt's history, and could not
understand why my poor mother burst into tears and
afterwards regretted this accidental rencontre. Geor-
giana Seymour, whom I met at Houghton, was her
daughter, presumably by Lord Cholmondeley. But the
Prince of Wales also claimed to be her father ; and in
those profligate days the mother was treated semi-
Royal by those who wished to flatter his Royal Highness.
. . . All the men of ton and many women received and
courted the mother."
156 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
Grace Dalrymple's daughter, who according to Lady
Shelley was brought up at Houghton with Lady Chol-
mondeley's children, married Lord Charles Bentinck,
son of the third Duke of Portland, and a fine portrait
of Dolly the Tall, by Gainsborough, is now in the Duke
of Portland's collection at Welbeck. As will be seen,
she sat again to Gainsborough in 1782, and perhaps a
third time (as Madame St. Alban) in 1785.
The writer in the General Evening Post who shows his
admiration so strongly for the fair but erring Dolly,
notices Gainsborough's peculiar talent for giving elegance
and grace to his figures, and he comments, as the other
critics do, upon the exact resemblance to the original
seen in the portrait of Mr. Christie, which was one of
those exhibited this year. The Morning Chronicle de-
clares the likeness to be so good that the printing of the
auctioneer's name in the catalogue was superfluous.
This journal, however, was less flattering to Lord Chester-
field, the successor in the title to the author of the
famous Letters, and the prosecutor of Dr. Dodd. Re-
ferring to the portrait of Lord Chesterfield in the Exhibi-
tion of 1778, the Morning Chronicle points out that the
painter has so happily caught his Lordship's character
that the countenance of the portrait has in it all the
insensibility and want of meaning for which the original
is remarkable ! The same critic complains that in spite
of their other excellencies most of Gainsborough's por-
traits at the Academy look as if the drapery and the
subordinate parts were unfinished, that the hands in some
of them are unsubstantial and informal, and that he
seems to have taken pains only with the heads of his
figures. " Perhaps," adds the writer mischievously, " he
found that Nature had done less for those parts than
for any other, and therefore gave them as much assist-
ance as lay within the compass of his art."
Two days afterwards the challenge about the " un-
finished parts " was taken up by Bate in the Morning
LONDON, 1777-1779 157
Post. " Gainsborough has been reproached with negh-
gence in finishing. If his pieces be view'd at a proper
distance, which as it is manifestly his design is the only
just way of estimating their merit, this imputation
will appear totally without foundation." In the same
notice Bate proclaims Gainsborough as the Apollo of
the Royal Academy ; not excelled even by Sir Joshua
Reynolds in his portraits, " and the competitor of Rubens
in his landscapes." One of Gainsborough's landscapes
{119) shown at the Academy of 1778, and described as
" beautiful to excess " was inspired by the passage from
Shenstone's Schoolmistress descriptive of the release of
the children at midday, and commencing :
" But now Dan Phcebus gains the middle sky,
And liberty unbars her prison door ;
And like a rushing torrent out they fly,
And now the grassy cirque have covered o'er
With boisterous revel, rout and wild uproar."
The portraits identified by Mr. Graves at the Academy
of 1778 are : No. 11 1, the Duchess of Devonshire ; Nos. 112
and 113, Lord and Lady Chesterfield; No. 114. Mrs.
Elliott ; No. 115, Miss Dalrymple ; No. 116, Clara Hay-
wood ; No. 408, De Loutherbourg the painter ; and
Nos. 407 and 409, Mr. and Mrs. Minet. For reasons
already given it is extremely unlikely that a portrait of
the Duchess of Devonshire was exhibited this year, and
the attribution of No. 115 to Miss Dalrymple seems
doubtful, unless Gainsborough painted two ladies of
that name. Otherwise, according to two contemporary
writers. Miss Dalrymple and Mrs. Elliott are one and the
same person, who figures in the full-length, No. 114. A
bust portrait of Mrs. Wise, shown at the National Loan
Exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery, 1913-1914, was
described in the catalogue as exhibited by Gainsborough
at the Academy of 1778.
In the following year of 1779 Gainsborough and Bate
lost their common friend David Garrick, who was buried
in February, with great state, in Westminster Abbey.
158 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
Bate was one of those invited to follow the actor to his
last resting-place, but I have been unable to find Gains-
borough's name in any list of those present at the inter-
ment. The Morning Post contains this year no eulogies
of Gainsborough's pictures at the Academy. Nor did
Bate renew them in his former manner until two years
afterwards, when he was able to write with a free hand
in his own journal, the Morning Herald. In fact, no
Academy criticisms of any kind are to be found in the
Morning Post of 1779, in which year, when the Exhibition
opened, public interest was centred almost entirely in
the court-martial on Admiral Palliser. To the reports
of this trial a large portion of the space devoted to news
was given day after day, and although a notice of the
Royal Academy was promised " in a future paper " I
have not been able to trace it. However, there were in-
dications of a change in the tendencies of the art criti-
cism, although Bate was still nominally editor of the
paper. The preliminary announcement of the promised
review of the Royal Academy, which never appeared,
stated that it would commence with a description of the
work of " that immortal artist. Sir Joshua Reynolds,"
but made no mention of Gainsborough. Everything
seems to indicate that Bate's power on the Morning Post
had lessened, and that the quarrels among the proprietors
had commenced which were to lead to the secession of
the editor and the foundation of the Morning Herald by
him in the autumn of the follo\\'ing year.
Other journals noticed Gainsborough's pictures at the
Academy in 1779, and in most cases favourably, but some
critics found fault with his portraits once more for the
alleged artificiality of their colouring. The St. Jafnes's
Chronicle was both pleased and displeased with his work.
The writer of the review in this paper, while admitting
that it is the fashion to admire the richness and em-
broidery of Mr. Gainsborough's landscapes, says that
the one shown is not to his taste ; and he also finds fault
LONDON, 1777-1779 159
with the expression of the face in the portrait of the
Duchess of Gloucester (Countess Waldegrave), whose
marriage to the King's brother was now acknowledged.
He thinks the portrait finely drawn and a striking like-
ness, but feels that Mr. Gainsborough is less happy in
his attitudes than Sir Joshua. The Duchess had been
seen so much in public that the artist should have been
very attentive to the expression of her countenance,
which is never that of contemplation, but always of a
placid good-nature. The same critic speaks of No. loi,
Two Ladies Half Length, as one of the most engaging
pictures he has ever seen. The ladies, he says, are
elegant and beautiful brunettes ; they are sisters, and
express in the most natural manner that kind of affection
that should subsist between them. This portrait of Two
Ladies Half Length has never been identified, but the
description in the St. James's Chronicle suggests that it
was probably the famous group of The Sisters Ramus,
shown in the Old Masters Exhibition of 1875 as The Two
Sisters, and for many years in the Graham collection. It
was sold at Christie's in 1887 for £9975 — a very large
price for that time — and was acquired by Baron Fer-
dinand de Rothschild. Three years later it was burnt
in the fire at Waddesdon Manor.
Gainsborough also exhibited at the Academy of 1779
portraits of the Duke of Argyll, the Duchess of Cumber-
land and Baron Perry n.
That Gainsborough visited Bath again in the summer
of 1779 is shown by a letter quoted in the catalogue of
a loan exhibition held in 1903 at the Birmingham Cor-
poration Art Gallery. The letter was quoted in connec-
tion with the exhibited portrait of Mr. Philip Ditcher, a
Bath surgeon to whom Gainsborough considered himself
indebted for services to his family. It^is addressed to
Mrs. Ditcher :
" Madam, — I am very glad the picture arrived safe
and meets with your approbation. With regard to the
i6o THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
price of the picture and frame I must acknowledge
myself overpaid abundantly by my worthy friend's
attention to my family while we lived at Bath, and
which I shall ever remember with gratitude. If you can,
pardon my neglect in not paying the carriage, which I
fully intended doing but for the hurry I was in the day
it went away. You may rest assured, Madam, that
what remains unpaid is from us to you. My family join
in best respects. And I remain, your most obedient
servant,
"Tho. Gainsborough.
"Bath, July 31, 1779-
" Mrs. Ditcher,
" Lansdown Road, Bath."
Gainsborough, it will be observed, writes to say that he
is glad the portrait arrived safely and apologises for not
paying the carriage, but as he and Mrs. Ditcher were
both at Bath it is curious that there should be any car-
riage to pay. It may be that the portrait was painted
in London and forwarded by carrier to Bath before the
artist himself set out. Mrs. Ditcher, to whom Gains-
borough's graceful note was addressed, was a daughter
of Samuel Richardson the novelist. She was very inti-
mate with Gainsborough's friends the Sheridans, and
R. B. Sheridan's sister was named Anne after her. Mrs.
Ditcher's daughter was one of the reigning toasts of
Bath a few years afterwards, and it is to her that Fanny
Bumey refers more than once as " the beautiful Miss
Ditcher."
CHAPTER IX
LONDON, I780-I781
The Royal Academy at Somerset House — Marriage of Mary Gains-
borough — John Christian Fischer — A cruel practical joke — The
unhappy marriage — Fischer's death — Opening of the Royal
Academy in 1780 — "An incredible concourse of people" — The
Candid Review — Gossett the wax-modeller — Gainsborough ex-
hibits a portrait of Bate — Not the National Gallery portrait —
More complaints of bad hanging — Gainsborough's landscapes
" beggar description " — The Academy Catalogue — Gainsborough
at the Academy of 1781 — " Confessedly its principal support" —
Bate's rapturous appreciation severely criticised — The London
Courant and the Earwig — Mauritius Lowe — The Shepherd — Por-
traits of the King and Queen — Another royal commission — The
young naval hero — Gainsborough the unofficial Court painter —
No backstairs influence — Why the King employed Gainsborough —
A new portrait of the Prince of Wales—" Leaning on a massy
sabre " — Perdita Robinson.
The year 1780 was marked by two events of importance
to Gainsborough, one of which concerned his professional
and the other his private hfe. The first was the estab-
hshment of the Royal Academy by the King in the im-
posing new building known as Somerset House ; and the
second the marriage of Mary, the painter's younger
daughter, to John Christian Fischer the musician, whose
acquaintance she had made many years earlier when her
father was hving at Bath. Gainsborough, though he had
a high opinion of Fischer's musical abilities, never liked
him as a man, and always disapproved of his attentions
to his daughters. I say daughters because there is reason
to beheve that Fischer had paid court to Margaret Gains-
borough as well as to her sister Mary. Gainsborough
himself thought this to be the case, and when he moved
from Bath to London, did all he could to prevent either
of his daughters from being in the musician's society.
i62 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
" And behold," he said, in a letter of 1775 already quoted,
" whilst I had my eye upon Peggy, the other slyboots, I
suppose, had all along been the object."
Mary Gainsborough's marriage has been described as
clandestine, but this was not the case. Her father's con-
sent was asked, but at such a late stage that he could
not refuse it without the risk of causing much unhappi-
ness. The wedding, I have discovered, took place at
St. Anne's Church, Soho, on February 21, 1780, in the
presence of Gainsborough, who presumably gave his
daughter away. The ceremony was performed (by
licence from the Archbishop of Canterbury) by the Rev.
William Hivens, described in the register as " minister,"
and the witnesses, in addition to Gainsborough, were his
wife and his nephew, Gainsborough Dupont. There is
no mention of Mary's elder sister, Margaret, who accord-
ing to her father was very unhappy about the marriage,
and perhaps on that account stayed at home on the
morning of the 21st of February. St. Anne's was chosen
for the ceremony because Soho was the parish of the
bridegroom, who lived at No. 23 Frith Street.
Two days after the wedding Gainsborough wrote to
Mrs. Gibbon, at Bath :
" Dear Sister, — I imagine you are by this time no
stranger to the alteration which has taken place in my
family. The notice I had of it was very sudden, as I
had not the least suspicion of the attachment being so
long and deeply settled ; and as it was too late for me
to alter anything without being the cause of total un-
happiness on both sides, my consent, which was a mere
compliment to affect to ask, I needs must give, whether
such a match was agreeable to me or not. I would not
have the cause of unhappiness lay upon my conscience,
and accordingly they were married last Monday, and
are settled for the present in a ready-furnished little house
in Curzon Street, Mayfair.
" I can't say I have any reason to doubt the man's
honesty or goodness of heart, as I never heard any one
speak anything amiss of him ; and as to his oddities and
JOHN CHKiSilAN FISCHER
By permission of H.M. the King
LONDON, 1780-1781 163
temper she must learn to like them as she likes his person,
for nothing can be altered now. I pray God she may be
happy with him and have her health, Peggy has been
very unhappy about it, but I endeavour to comfort her,
in hope that she will have more pride and goodness than
to do anything without first asking my advice and appro-
bation. We shall see how they go on, and I shall write
to you further upon the subject. I hope you are all
well, and with best wishes, I remain your affectionate
brother,
"Thos. Gainsborough."
Gainsborough, who says in this letter that he " had
not the least suspicion of the attachment being so long
and deeply settled," seems to have forgotten that in 1775,
more than four years earlier, he had written to his sister
to say that he had discovered that Mary and Fischer
were corresponding secretly.
John Christian Fischer was a peiiormer on the oboe,
of which instrument he was a master. When he first
arrived in England from Germany he played at a
concert at the house of the Duke of Cumberland, in
whose band was an oboe-player named Simpson, at that
time regarded as pre-eminent in England. Simpson hs-
tened to the performance of the new arrival, and at once
declared that the German's excellence was unapproach-
able, and that after hearing him, he could never again
venture to play a solo in public. Fischer was appointed
to the Queen's band the year after his marriage, with
a retaining salary of £200 a year, and Fanny Bumey has
recorded the impression his music left upon her mind
when she heard him at Windsor in 1786. " Imagine
what a charm to my ears ensued on the opening of the
evening concert, when the sweet-flo\\'ing, melting, celestial
notes of Fischer's hautboy reached them ! It made the
evening pass so soothingly I could listen to nothing else."
But the position in the Queen's band was not one of
unalloyed happiness, for Fischer, shy, eccentric, and proud
of his profession, deeply resented an unpleasant prac-
i64 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
tical joke of which he was the victim at Windsor in the
same year. Bate, who was interested in Fischer both as
a musician and as the son-in-law of his friend Gains-
borough, described the incident soon after it happened
in one of his gossiping paragraphs in the Morning Herald :
" ]\Ir. Fischer, the celebrated performer on the oboe,
who is no less remarkable for the irritability of his nerves
than for his skill as a musician, was lately at Windsor to
assist at a concert given by their Majesties to a select
party of the nobility. He was desired to play one of his
concertos, which he did with great approbation, but just
as he was about to conclude on one of his most elaborate
cadences the young Prince Adolphus, who had found
means to conceal himself below the music desk, with
great dexterity whipt the oboe out of his hands, and left
the astonished musician in the attitude of playing but
without an instrument ! The figure of Fischer was so
extremely ludicrous that the whole company burst into
a loud laugh, and the Royal Pair could not refrain from
joining in the chorus. It was some time before they
were grave enough to order the Prince to be disgraced
for the evening, and poor Fischer was so much discon-
certed that after recovering his hautboy he retreated \\dth
great precipitation."
The young Prince who snatched the otoe from Fischer
was the father of the late Duke of Cambridge, and grand-
father of Queen ]\Iary.
Another oboe-player of the same time, Parke, who
was acquainted with both Gainsborough and his son-in-
law, says that Fischer had devoted himself so constantly
to his musical studies that he had enjoyed very little
intercourse with society, and in consequence forgot his
own language without acquiring any other. Although of
distinguished appearance, he seems to have been a dull
man apart from his music, and an unfit companion for
the handsome and accomplished Mary Gainsborough. A
writer, who records the death of Mrs. Fischer, deplores
the fact that Gainsborough permitted his daughter to be
married to a man " devoid of prudence, and with no
LONDON, 1780-1781 165
more intellect than his hautboy." Parke, who described
Gainsborough as a hvely companion, says that when the
painter was talking about the oddities of his son-in-law
he mentioned walking with him one frosty day in Pall
Mall. A gentleman immediately in front of them slipped
on some ice and fell heavily. Fischer, startled, splut-
tered out, " I never did that — I never in my hfe made a
slip." " And in a fortnight," said Gainsborough rue-
fully to Parke, " he married my daughter ! "
The fact that Gainsborough exhibited a whole-length
portrait of his son-in-law at the Academy of 1780, only
a few weeks after the marriage, shows that the two men
must have been temporarily reconciled. But the truce
did not last long. The married life of the Fischers, com-
menced in " the ready-furnished Httle house in Curzon
Street, Mayfair," soon came to an end, and the musician
and his wife lived apart for the rest of their days. It is
significant that when Gainsborough, with the hand of
death upon him, made his will eight years afterwards,
he was careful to tie up the money left to his daughter,
Mary Fischer, so that it should not be subject to " the
debts, power, control, or intermeddling " of her husband.
Fischer lived for more than twenty years after his mar-
riage, but with his hfe during that period the biographer
of Gainsborough is not concerned. He played the last
of his " melting, celestial notes " in the presence of the
King and Queen at a concert given at Buckingham
House. Fischer was performing, and had just finished
the first movement of his concerto when he had a stroke
of apoplexy and fell on to the instrument — a double bass
— of the musician next to him. The King was much
affected, and after calling in the nearest medical aid
that could be obtained, sent the sufferer home in one of
the royal carriages. Fischer, who died an hour or so
after reaching the house, desired in his last moments
that all his manuscript music should be presented to his
Majesty.
i66 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
The removal of the Royal Academy to Somerset
House, which I have mentioned as an important event
of Gainsborough's professional life in 1780, added new
dignity to the institution presided over by Sir Joshua
Reynolds. The old rooms in Pall Mall, not far from
Gainsborough's house, in which the pictures were shown
previously, were now exchanged for galleries designed for
the purpose, and forming part of a national building
containing apartments for the keeper and accommoda-
tion for the schools. The press was not slow to recognise
the honour bestowed upon the Academy by the King in
granting the galleries. Bate praises the new rooms in
the Morning Post, but with the praise couples a thrust
at the President :
" Yesterday the exhibition of the artists at the Royal
Academy was opened in the new buildings, Somerset
Place, where a noble suite of rooms has been adapted
for that purpose. The grand room is at the top, which
receives a fine refracted light from the arched side win-
dows above. The rooms beneath are appropriated for
drawings, models, statues, busts, &c. At the end of one
of them are portraits of their Majesties by Sir Joshua
Reynolds, which, if it were not likely to be deemed high
treason against the Prince of Painters, we should be apt
to criticise pretty freely. . . . The concourse of people
who attended the opening of the exhibition yesterday
was incredible ; the carriages filled the whole wide space
from the New Church to Exeter Change. It is computed
that the doorkeepers did not take less than £500 yes-
terday for the admission of the numerous visitants of all
ranks."
Another writer, on the 17th of May, supplements Bate's
account by a statement that no fewer than twenty thou-
sand copies of the catalogue had been sold during the
first fortnight of the Exhibition. These figures may be
exaggerated, but the Academy records show that the
receipts of the first season at Somerset House were more
than double those of the best year in Pall Mall.
LONDON, 1780-1781 167
To Somerset House in 1780 Gainsborough sent six
landscapes and ten portraits, all of which helped to
increase his reputation. The identification of the por-
traits this year is simpHfied by a pamphlet, published in
May 1780, .4 Candid Review of the Exhibition, in which
all Gainsborough's works are described. The Candid
Review, which appeared almost simultaneously with the
opening of the Exhibition, was criticised in more than one
journal on the ground that it must have been written by
some one possessed of inside information concerning the
new galleries at Somerset House and the pictures con-
tained in them. This, though annoying to rival and less
privileged pamphleteers, adds considerably to the value
of the Candid Review, whose writer probably had access
to the lists of names which the painters of anonymous
portraits were obliged to send to the Academy with their
works. A correspondent of the Gazetteer, in a letter
attacking the author of the Candid Review, says : "It
is plain that either you or somebody for you must have
seen everything before it was open to the pubUc, for
how could you view and judge of more than four hundred
performances, write a pamphlet, and publish it, all in
one day ? "
Gainsborough's ten portraits represented his son-in-
law, Fischer (" So like, but so handsome," as Susan
Burney wrote to her sister Fanny), General Conway, the
Rev. Mr. Stevens, Mr. Crosdill, Madame le Brun, Hen-
derson the actor, Mr. George Coyte, Mrs. Beaufoy, the
Rev. Henry Bate, and the gentleman whom Walpole
describes as " Mr. Fossett," and Fulcher as " the Rev.
Gossett, the well-known book collector." The Candid
Review also refers to this gentleman as Mr. Gossett, but
a descriptive note that follows the name shows that
Gainsborough's sitter was not the Rev. Isaac Gossett
the bibhophile but his father, Isaac Gossett the modeller.
The note on this portrait {No. 33) says, " A strong Hke-
ness of Mr. Gossett, and appears as much reheved as if
i68 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
it was a model by the artist it represents." Isaac Gos-
sett, the elder, was the inventor of a composition of wax
in which he modelled portraits in a fashion that brought
him royal and other patronage. Gainsborough, who
was himself an amateur in wax modelling, appears to
have known Gossett very well. The modeller was prob-
ably the Mr. Gossett whose name is to be found in the
list of mourners at Gainsborough's funeral.
When noticing the Exhibition of 1780 Fulcher refers
to the portrait of " the Rev. Henry Bate, editor of the
Morning Post," and says, " Gainsborough painted a
second portrait of him, standing in a garden with his
dog, a work of great beauty of design and handling."
Fulcher, I think, was in error here, for what he de-
scribes as the second portrait is evidently the one ex-
hibited in 1780 — the full-length now in the collection
of Lady Burton. The description in the Candid Review
fits the Burton portrait, and there is no record of another
full length of Bate. The description is as follows : " The
Reverend Mr, Bate, and perhaps there never was a more
perfect resemblance. The modest style of the drapery,
and the genteel figure of the person, assisting the painter,
he has produced a most admirable picture. The dog is
very fine." Lady Burton's portrait shows Bate very
quietly and unobtrusively dressed, standing in a land-
scape with gloves and cane in his right hand and a dog
beside him. The National Gallery catalogue states that
the bust portrait of Bate at Trafalgar Square was
exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1780, but this is a
mistake. Bate's reputation as a fighter is hinted at in
amusing fashion by the Cajidid Review when describing
Fuseli's picture of Satayv starting from the Touch of
IthurieVs Lance which Walpole speaks of as " extrava-
gant and ridiculous." At the Royal Academy Fuseli's
canvas was flanked on one side by Gainsborough's por-
trait of the editor of the Morning Post, and on the other
by a representation of a Highland officer by Copley.
LONDON, 1780-1781 169
" We have more reason than one," says the reviewer, "to
fancy there was a Httle playful spark of satire in the
arrangement of the pictures ; it would not trust the
Devil between any but the Highlander and Mr. Bate."
The Highland officer painted by Copley was Major Mont-
gomery, who had been engaged not long before in fighting
the Cherokees, whose blazing wigwams were introduced
into the background of the picture.
Bate speaks, of course, in appreciative terms of Gains-
borough's work in the review of the Academy' of 1780
that appeared in the Morning Post. But he does not
write with the freedom and assurance which distinguish
the eulogies of 1777 and 1778, and those which appeared
in the Morning Herald in later years. His notice is brief,
and he refers to no work specifically, perhaps because
his own. portrait was one of Gainsborough's most con-
spicuous canvases. He remarks how liberally the artist
has contributed to the Exhibition both in portraiture and
landscape, and concludes with another complaint of the
injustice of the hangers :
" As there is but one opinion this season respecting
Mr. Gainsborough's superior excellence in either style
there can be no necessity for our pointing out any of his
productions to the attention of our readers. It is to be
lamented, however, that the generality of his beautiful
landscapes could not have been placed in such a light
and at such distance for which they were evidently
painted."
No doubt in making this protest Bate had particularly
in his mind the sunny picture in which a shepherd and his
flock were the principal features. This work, described
by the Lotidon C our ant, as " a most enchanting landscape
by Gainsborough, touched with infinite spirit and grace,"
was placed above the doonvay of the great room at
Somerset House.
Gainsborough's landscapes this year, whether well or
badly hung, attracted favourable opinions on all sides.
170 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
Horace Walpole, who by a special invitation of the
Academy Council was admitted to the new galleries
before they were thrown open to the public, praises the
six landscapes in terms of the extremes t eulogy. Ac-
cording to the Morning Chronicle, they " beggar descrip-
tion," and another writer describes as " incomparable
indeed " the picture No. 197, in which the artist has
introduced horses and cattle. It is difficult to identify
Gainsborough's exhibited pictures of this class, as he
always describes them in the catalogue as "A Land-
scape," or " Landscape," but one of those in the Academy
of 1780 was certainly the work afterwards engraved with
some lines from Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard
inscribed beneath the print. This picture in its entirety
has disappeared, but Lord Ronald Gower owned a por-
tion of it which showed the figures of a man and a woman
spelling out the name on an old tomb in a churchyard.
In the Academy Catalogue of 1780 it is No. 319, Landscape,
and a contemporary journal describes it as a picture " of
peasants viewing inscriptions on a tombstone amidst the
ruins of a religious building, well calculated to captivate
the heart." A description of No. 62, Landscape, suggests
that it may have been the Cottage Door, now in the
Duke of Westminster's collection. " This beautiful scene
where serenity and pleasure dwell in every spot, and the
lovely figures composed in the finest rural style, their
situation worthy of them, forms a scene of happiness
that may truly be called Adam's paradise." Another
writer says of this landscape that its centre of interest is
" a beautiful group of children and their mother."
The removal of the Royal Academy to Somerset
House in 1780 was accompanied by an attempt to reform
the catalogue of the Exhibition, which hitherto had been
both defective and inconvenient . This was in part owing
to the fact that many artists (not necessarily members)
were allowed to send empty frames on the days fixed
for delivering works ; keeping back and working upon
LONDON, 1780-1781 171
the canvases themselves until the last moment. In such
conditions it was impossible to compile the lists of works
properly before the opening of the Exhibition, and many
of the earlier catalogues contain an additional page or
so of " omitted " pictures. In 1778 three of Gains-
borough's works were in the " omitted " list, and Fulcher,
who has overlooked the supplementary pages, does not
include these pictures among the exhibits of the year.
The reform of 1780 was, however, rather an attempt to
remodel the catalogue than to improve its accuracy.
In the catalogues of preceding years the works of
each man were grouped under his name and numbered
consecutively, but the pictures themselves were distri-
buted all over the galleries. This had caused many
complaints in the press from people who could not find
the pictures they were in search of ; and as early as 1775
a correspondent of the Public Advertiser had suggested
the adoption of a new method.
"Many persons," he wrote, "who visit the annual
exhibitions of the Royal Academy have found the mode
of classing the works of the ]\Iasters in the printed cata-
logues very inconvenient and troublesome : being not at
all conformable to the disposition of them in the room,
for in the manner the catalogue has hitherto been made
out, it is very difficult to find any particular perform-
ance sought for without much trouble and patience,
and the blending of various and distant numbers upon
the pieces which succeed each other creates a confused
and disagreeable process. Now as most people pursue
their view in a progressive course round the rooms from
left to right it is submitted whether the exhibitions may
not be rendered more convenient and agreeable by
ordering the arrangement of the pieces in the room and
in the catalogue to go hand in hand ; that is after the
pieces are properly placed in the room, then to number
them progressively, beginning with numbers i, 2, &c.
at the left-hand entrance of the room and continuing the
following numbers round the room as contiguous to
each other as convenience will admit."
172 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
Although the correspondent of the Public Advertiser
was not a master of the art of expression, his idea was a
good one, and it was adopted in the Academy Catalogue
of 1780, which was upon the whole well received by the
public. However, one journal thought the new cata-
logue inferior to the one compiled on the original method,
and a correspondent of the Morning Post pointed out
that it was still imperfect in one important particular.
He says that he has just returned from a visit to the
Academy Exhibition, and while disclaiming any intention
of attempting to criticise the performances he would
like to say something about the catalogue. The new
arrangement he finds abundantly better than the old.
" But the intention of my writing to you is to suggest
a very obvious and very easy improvement which would
render the catalogue quite complete, as it would enable
one instantly to find any picture, or all the pictures of
any artist. It is, sir, only to add at the end of the
alphabetical series of artists, the numbers of that artist's
performances. Thus, for instance — Sir Joshua Reynolds,
No. 12, 18, 32, 102, 138, 157, 167." This eminently sen-
sible addition to the catalogue was made exactly as the
writer suggested, but not immediately. The numbers
were not placed after the names of the artists until
1783, when Gainsborough found to his cost that it was
still possible to make mistakes in the catalogue by
omitting pictures altogether.
After the brief notice of his work in the Royal
Academy of 1780 nothing more about Gainsborough
appeared in the Morning Post during Bate's editorship.
This did not continue long, for it was in November of
the same year that he founded the Morning Herald, of
which, as proprietor and editor, he had absolute control.
As soon as he had got over the troubles connected with
his imprisonment for libels which had appeared in the
Morning Post during his editorship of that journal, he
used his power on the Morning Herald to further to the
LONDON, 1780-1781 173
fullest extent the interest of his painter-friend in Pall
Mall. With the opening of the Academy Exhibition of
1781 the editor of the Morning Herald commenced to
advocate Gainsborough in his new journal.
The time was opportune, for the artist was showing
at Somerset House full-length portraits of the King and
Queen ; a portrait of Bishop Hurd, painted for her
Majesty ; three landscapes ; and a picture of a country
boy, A Shepherd, which was the first rustic figure by
Gainsborough to attract attention. Bate, in his opening
review in the Morning Herald, follows a displayed list of
Gainsborough's pictures by a panegyric, in the course
of which the old complaints of unfair hanging once more
make their appearance. This year, however, Gains-
borough was on the ground instead of above a door.
" Mr. Gainsborough," says the Morning Herald, " is
confessedly the principal support of the present exhibi-
tion. The critic eye alternately wanders from his por-
traits to his landscapes and becomes too much enraptured
with either to decide which are most entitled to pre-
eminence. The King's is by far the most striking, and
at the same time the most correct and graceful portrait
ever given of him. The Queen's is the only happy likeness
we ever saw pourtrayed of her Majesty ; the head is
not only very highly finished but expresses all that
amiableness of character which so justly distinguishes
her. There is a stiffness in full dress that always cruelly
militates against the artist in spite of his best endeavours ;
this is evident in the above picture, though the drapery
is charmingly pencilled and reheved. The head of the
Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry, painted for the Queen,
is finely executed ; but the Shepherd Boy in a tempes-
tuous scene is evidently the chef d'ceuvre of this great
artist, a composition in which the numberless beauties
of design, drawing, and colouring are so admirably blended
as to excite the admiration of every beholder. Mr. Gains-
borough's two sea-views show the universality of his
genius, for though they are his first attempts in this
line the water is exquisitely painted. The landscape of
cattle passing over a bridge is equally fine, but the effect
174 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
of it, like that of his other productions, is shamefully
destroyed by the picture being hung almost close to the
ground. Strange that the fame of an artist who is
honoured with the most flattering marks of his Sove-
reign's favour should be sacrificed on the pitiful shrine
of ignorance or jealousy."
This confident assertion of the supremacy of Gains-
borough was made in a year when his great rival was
unusually well represented at the Academy. Sir Joshua's
pictures at the Exhibition included the group of the Ladies
Waldegrave, the portrait of Lord Richard Cavendish, the
Master Bunbury, and other fine canvases, and it was not
likely that the statement in the Morning Herald would
remain unchallenged. It was attacked two days later
by the London Courant, in which a contributor writing
above the signature " Ensis " made some remarks that
were equally uncomplimentary to Bate's knowledge and
judgment and to his newly founded journal.
" As now," wrote the champion of Reynolds, " every
man who can escape with a shilhng from the taxes may
be a connoisseur, thousands will exercise their criticisms
on the mute victims of Somerset House. Some of them
will undoubtedly oblige the public with their remarks,
and to these I take the hberty of offering some salutary
advice — not to confound the classes of artists. A morn-
ing paper that struggles to erect itself into the Herald
of renown and infamy, has sounded the first blast with
the name of Gainsborough ; a name however honourable
in its rank, not honourable enough to head a class or to
be often repeated by posterity. According to this critic
Gainsborough has left behind him all who painted the
Royal Pair before him. His King is grand ; in his Queen
he has unveiled the Graces ; his Bishop is the warm truth
of life ; in his landscapes he has silenced nature ; but
beggared pathos and description in the Beggar Boy of
St. James's Street. Such is his impertinent and ignorant
rapture in a place that exhibits sixteen pieces by Rey-
nolds, the least of which exceeds the power of Gains-
borough as far as Johnson's that of Bate. Gainsborough
is too respectable an artist not to be sensible that the
LONDON, 1780-1781 175
dignity of Reynolds's King, the bleak heroism of his
Cavendish, the wanton frenzy of his Thais, the domestic
elegance of his Waldegraves, the infant grace of his
Rutlands, the simplicity of every dimpled babe that
ever sprung from his hands, are in a line of art which
the vaunted painter of the King and Shepherd must
never hope to obtain, whilst the Dido and the Virtues
shall probably remain for ever beyond the reach of
his eye."
In the same issue of the London C our ant that con-
tains this vigorous defence of the President, appears a
criticism of the Academy Exhibition written by another
hand, and here Bate's complaint of the unfair hanging
of Gainsborough's pictures is strongly supported. The
critic, after praising the broad, bold, masterly style of
No. yy, Landscape, says :
" His pictures can never be seen to advantage when
the room is filled with company, as they are hung much
too near the eye. If they were too far from the eye it
might perhaps be equally bad ; but an artist of this
gentleman's merit should be particularly accommodated,
though inferior artists suffer by it. If his pictures hung
the same height with those of Barrett's they would
have a noble effect. The distance from the eye should
not be in proportion to the size of the picture, but in
proportion to the breadth of light and shadow and the
high finishing."
With the comments of the London C our ant on this
matter it is interesting to compare those of the Earwig,
an anonymous critical pamphlet of the exhibition of
1781. In parts the two are almost identical, and the
similarity suggests that the same hand wrote both the
criticisms. The Earwig, for example, says, " The works
of this artist have always been prejudiced by being
hung too near or too far from the eye. The distance
should be proportioned not to the size of the picture
but to the finishing, the Hght and the shadow." The
supposed writer of the Earwig — and apparently of the
176 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
criticisms in the London Courant — ^was Mauritius Lowe,
the earhest winner of the gold medal and travelling
studentship for historical painting given by the Royal
Academy. Lowe was a discreditable person in whom
Dr. Johnson took a strange interest, and who owes what
little distinction he has to the fact that he was one of
the first teachers of Turner. So far as the Earwig was
concerned he had good reason for wishing to preserve
his anonymity, for the artists of the time were indignant
at the comments contained in the pamphlet, and some
of them were considering the desirability of taking legal
action against the author and pubHsher.
The admiration expressed by Bate for Gainsborough's
two sea-pieces, " his first attempts in that hne," was
shared by Walpole, who in a well-known passage of a
letter to Mason describing the Exhibition of 1781 says,
" Gainsborough has two pieces with land and sea so
free and natural that one steps back for fear of being
splashed." One of these must have been No. 94, of
which a contemporary critic writes, " The clouds seem in
motion, the waves to be retiring from the beach, and
the fishing boats really float on the waves." The other
sea-piece I cannot identify. Bate speaks of " the land-
scape with cattle passing a bridge," which may be the
same picture described in another journal as having its
principal light in a white cow in the centre of the canvas,
and with figures well grouped. Another picture was much
admired for " the native comeliness and grace of its
female peasants," by a writer, who after commending
Gainsborough's landscapes for their general truthfulness,
adds "yet they appear when near like mere sketches,
and everything is found in their effect."
The portraits of their Majesties received contemporary
praise as good likenesses, the King more than the Queen ;
but one writer, while admitting the resemblance of both,
thought that the King's face was too small, and perhaps
too red. Walpole thought the King's portrait " very
LONDON, 1780-1781 177
like, but stiff and raw." Beattie, who saw the royal
portraits in the Academy, speaks of the King's as the
strongest he had ever seen ; but he disapproved of the
attitudes both of his Majesty and the Queen. The por-
trait of the Bishop was also admired, but for Gains-
borough the popular success of the year was A Shep-
herd. This picture of the lad sitting on the ground with
a dog by his side was universally admired, and the Earwig
proclaimed it to be the best work at the Royal Academy.
Soon after the close of the Exhibition Gainsborough
was offered, and accepted, another royal commission.
Prince William Henry, afterwards William the Fourth,
was at this time a young officer in the Navy, and the
King, anxious to have the portrait of his sailor son
painted before he joined the squadron on the American
coast, sent for Gainsborough to Buckingham House.
The Prince sat twice, with the result that the artist
produced " so striking and characteristic a portrait of
the young naval hero that all the Court connoisseurs
who have seen it declare it to be one of the finest por-
traits they ever beheld." By the middle of July 1781
Gainsborough had attained a position akin to that of a
Court painter, although he had no actual appointment.
We are told that " Gainsborough's fame is now quite
established at Buckingham House. His success with the
royal portraits, so applauded in the last Exhibition, is
even outdone by the happy manner in which he has hit
off the portrait of the Prince. So that he is now, vice
Mr. Zoffanii and other predecessors, the Apollo of the
Palace." The portrait of William the Fourth as a young
naval officer, which made secure Gainsborough's position
at Buckingham House and helped to bring him many
commissions to paint other Princes and Princesses, re-
mained in royal hands until the death of King William's
nephew, the late Duke of Cambridge. It was sold at
Christie's, with the pictures belonging to the Duke, soon
after his death in 1904. Acquired by Messrs. Knoedler
M
178 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
of New Bond Street, the portrait was sent to America
and exhibited at the firm's New York gallery. From
thence it was sold to Mr. John F. Talmage, and subse-
quently repurchased by Messrs. Knoedler.
The painter's success at Court was not welcomed by
his rivals, and envious tongues soon spread rumours that
back-stairs influence had been employed to secure the
commissions. These were at once contradicted by Bate,
who took pains to make it clear that his friend owed the
royal patronage only to his own merits. " Superior," he
said, " to the ungentleman-like talk of offering the in-
cense of adulation to any lordly courtier, his genius had
never flourished under the beams of royal favour but
for the judicious taste of the King himself." The King,
it appeared, had been so struck with the merit of Gains-
borough's work at the Academy of 178 1 that he had sent
for him at once to Buckingham House and offered him
new commissions. The fortunate painter at the same
time secured the patronage of the young Prince of Wales,
who sat at Schomberg House several times in August
and again in October. Gainsborough is described as
making at this time a study of the Prince wearing the
uniform of a general officer and " easily reclining on a
massy sabre," The large portrait of the Prince of Wales
standing by his horse, shown at the Academy in the suc-
ceeding spring, was also in progress in the autumn of 178 1.
In October the first mention is made of one of Gains-
borough's most exquisite portraits of women — the full-
length of " Perdita " Robinson. It was finished by the
end of the month, and currency was given to a rumour
that it was to be sent to France. But of this famous
work and of its sale for an absurdly small sum there is
more to tell in the next chapter.
CHAPTER X
LONDON, 1782
Gainsborough commences a new picture — Many portraits in progress —
Perdita Robinson — She sits to Reynolds, Gainsborough, and
Romney — Gainsborough's portrait not a hkeness — The tragedy of
her Hfe — Her goods seized by the sheriff — The famous portrait sold
for thirty-two guineas — A crowd at the Academy — Sir Joshua
and Gainsborough — Rival portraits of Colonel Tarleton — Gains-
borough's landscapes — His Girl with Pigs bought by Sir Joshua —
His letter with "half a hundred compliments" — How the Girl
with Pigs was painted — Another portrait of " Dolly the Tall" —
Portraits of the Prince of Wales and Colonel St. Leger — The
Prince pays for both — Gainsborough painting the Prince's horse —
An error corrected — Tarleton's portrait — "Would make an ex-
cellent sign for the ' Horse and Groom ' " — Painting the Royal
Family — Sir Joshua at Schomberg House.
Encouraged by the success of A Shepherd, Gains-
borough was engaged in January 1782 upon a companion
to that picture in the shape of a study of a peasant girl
gathering sticks in a wood. It was commenced with the
idea of sending it to the Academy, but the capricious
painter changed his mind and it was not shown at
Somerset House, This may be the picture of a girl with
a bundle of sticks in her arms that was lent by Captain
Abdy to the National Loan Exhibition at the Grafton
Galleries in 1909-10, and exhibited as The Cottage Girl.
An unfinished Peasant Girl with Sticks was sold by Mrs.
Gainsborough nine years after her husband's death for
five guineas.
February 1782 saw the completion of the full-length
portrait of the Prince of Wales, and another of the
Prince's friend, Colonel St. Leger ; while a third was in
hand of Colonel Tarleton, whose exploits in the American
War were still fresh in the recollection of the public. In
179
i8o THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
March it was announced that Gainsborough's portrait of
Colonel Tarleton was intended for the forthcoming
Academy, together with those of the Prince of Wales,
Colonel St. Leger, Mrs. Robinson, and Madame Bacelli
— all full-lengths — and a kit-cat of the Duke of Dorset.
Only four of these were afterwards exhibited. The
Duke of Dorset's portrait may have been \nthdrawn be-
cause he did not care to appear with such publicity in
the society of the Bacelli, the Italian dancer whom he
had installed as mistress of Knole. The Duke was less
particular later, when he allowed the lady to perform in
public wearing his ribbon of the Garter, at the time, too,
when he was Ambassador to the French Court. Walpole
says in a letter to Hannah More : " The Bacelli lately
danced at the Opera in Paris with a blue bandeau in-
scribed Honi soit qui mal y pense. Was it not ingenious,
and was not the Ambassador so to allow it ? No doubt
he took it as a compliment to his o\\'n knee."
The withdrawal of the portrait of Perdita Robinson
was probably caused by an article, full of scandalous
gossip, which appeared in the Public Advertiser a fort-
night before the opening of the Academy. The writer
of the Bon Ton Intelligence in that journal comments in
outspoken terms on the doings of the demi-monde. He
says that Mrs. Robinson had turned to the best account
her connection with the Prince of Wales (described as
"a certain young gentleman"), and by threatening to
publish his letters had obtained £10,000 as hush-
money. Perdita had in fact been so prosperous that she
had lately been enabled to give two commissions for
portraits of herself to Romney, one to Gainsborough and
one to Sir Joshua Reynolds. The \\Titer says that he
has seen them all, and gives an estimate of what he con-
ceives to be their comparative value.
Sir Joshua's painting, a study of Perdita attired hke
the first wife of Rubens, he regards as incomparably the
best, and he asserts that in this instance the President
MRS. ROBINSON
The Wallace Collection
LONDON, 1782 181
not only outdoes his brother artists but excels himself.
The head by Romney is placed second, and next to this
the half-length by the same artist. Last of all comes
the " whole-length sitting, in a modem dress " by Gains-
borough, which is declared to be in no sense a hkeness
of the original. It is easy to understand that Gains-
borough, reading a criticism of his portrait of I\Irs. Robin-
son which condemned it as a likeness — ^the point above
all others upon which he prided himself — and knowing
that Reynolds was sending to the Academy a study of
the same sitter, of which report spoke highly, may have
been moved to withhold from exhibition a canvas that
is ranked by modern critics among his masterpieces.
The original of this portrait was the young actress
whose acquaintance with the Prince of Wales commenced
at a performance of A Winter's Tale, in which she ap-
peared as Perdita. Her intrigue with the Prince had
recently terminated, although she was at this time in
the flower of her beauty. Her alleged ill-treatment by
the Prince of Wales had brought her a certain amount of
public sympathy and an increase of popularity, and her
admirers were innumerable. Mrs. Robinson's affections
were, however, centred in the dashing cavalry officer.
Colonel Tarleton, and her portrait by Gainsborough was
to have been shown at the Academy with that of her
lover from the same hand. Her deepest and most lasting
attachment was for Tarleton, the man who was respon-
sible, though unintentionally, for the tragedy of the
unhappy Perdita's Ufe. The writer of a memoir of
Mrs. Robinson, pubhshed immediately after her death,
states that the illness which made her a cripple owed
its origin directly to Tarleton's financial troubles. For
some unexplained reason — perhaps to pay a debt of
honour — he was in urgent need of £'800. The affair
admitted of no delay; he must have the money at
once or leave the country. Hearing this, Mrs. Robin-
son, who had no property upon which such an amount
i82 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
could be raised, immediately applied to the person (appa-
rently Fox) who had been the arbiter of her fortunes in
the settlement made by the Prince of Wales. She asked
for a loan of £800, and received £300 at once and the
promise of the rest in the morning.
Meanwhile Tarleton, who knew nothing of her appli-
cation and its result, had disappeared and could not be
found anywhere, although he had promised to meet her
the same night at the opera. Mrs. Robinson rightly
concluded that he had departed, intentionally without
saying good-bye, because she had declared that in the
last extremity she would go with him, and he had re-
fused to allow her as he had only £20 at his com-
mand. She knew the port Tarleton intended to sail
from, and " with the passion and zeal of a generous mind,
between two and three o'clock in the morning threw
herself into a post-chaise to follow him, but without
taking sufficient precautions of dress against the cold,
although it was the depth of winter and the weather
was very severe. She was agitated and heated with her
apprehensions, and in that situation fell asleep. At the
first stage she was obliged to be carried into the inn,
almost frozen ; and from that hour she never recovered
the entire use of her limbs. For a long period the joints
of her fingers were contracted, but they were after\vards
partially restored, and she could even wTite with facility.
But from the time of that accident she could never
walk nor even stand, and was always carried from one
room to another and to and from her carriage. Mrs.
Robinson consoled herself with having effected the ser-
vice she proposed by this unfortunate journey, and never
once was known peevishly to lament the irreparable con-
sequences."
Crippled at twenty-four, this beautiful woman, who
had been the pupil of Hannah More at Bristol and was
for her time well educated, now betook herself to litera-
ture and managed to earn a considerable income for
LONDON, 1782 183
some years. She was at one time connected with the
Morning Post, and her parties, which were frequently
attended by Sir Joshua Reynolds, attracted numbers of
literary and artistic people. But in spite of her efforts
Mrs. Robinson was always more or less in embarrassed
circumstances, and in one of her periods of difficulty she
was obliged to part with Gainsborough's portrait of her-
self. This incident has not been mentioned hitherto in
any record of the life of the actress or the artist.
In 1785 Perdita's affairs were in such a hopeless
state that an execution was put into her house in Ber-
keley Square by the Sheriff of Middlesex. Her furni-
ture, wardrobe, diamonds, and other effects, including
" the highly finished portrait of Mrs. Robinson by Gains-
borough," were taken to the rooms of Messrs. Hutchins,
Boulton & Philips, King Street, Covent Garden, where
they were sold by auction. Before commencing to dis-
pose of the goods the auctioneer stated that if anyone
would pay or give security for £250 the sale would
not proceed, but his offer met with no response. Mrs.
Robinson's portrait, which was hanging on the wall
between prints of her rival admirers, the Prince of Wales
and Colonel Tarleton, was then put up ; but it attracted
few bids, and the famous canvas that is now in the
Wallace Collection at Hertford House was knocked down
for thirty-two guineas to some lucky purchaser whose
name has not been recorded. He was probably an
agent of the Prince of Wales, as in 1790 the " fine whole
length portrait of Mis. Robinson by Gainsborough " is
described by a contemporary writer as then in possession
of the Prince, from whose hands, as Mr. Lionel Cust
discovered, the portrait passed in 18 18 into those of
the third Marquis of Hertford. To obtain the Perdita for
thirty-two guineas was a bargain indeed ; and fortunate
too was the buyer at Sotheby's, who purchased Mrs.
Robinson's memoirs nearly thirty years after her death.
Written " chiefly on the backs of letters addressed to
i84 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
her by the most distinguished persons of her time, with
their seals and autographs," and running to several
hundred pages, this remarkable collection of manuscripts
fetched only £3, 8s. under the hammer.
In the spring of 1782, to which we now return after
this digression, the opening of the Royal Academy was
awaited with exceptional interest by those whose curio-
sity had been excited by the prehminary notes in the
newspapers, then a new feature in journalism, and the
rooms were crowded almost to the point of suffocation
soon after the doors were thrown open on the 29th of
April. The eighteenth century had few of our modern
prejudices in favour of fresh air, but the endurance of
the visitors was nevertheless severely tried on the first
day at the Academy. " The curiosity of the town,"
declared one of them, " was so generally ardent, that
before one, the room had such a crowd in it as made the
atmosphere for the purpose of respiration a little irk-
some, and if our philosophy did not tell us that there
is a power in the human lungs to redress themselves
against climate we might not be without fear that the
room might be insalutary. We certainly cannot err in
recommending some means of ventilation."
The Exhibition, for the sake of seeing which many
visitors on that April day must have suffered from
Academy headache, was once more a battle ground for
Gainsborough and Reynolds. The contest between the
two was now a recognised thing, and it was more than
ever marked this year because it was known that both
artists had been painting Mrs. Robinson and the Bacelh,
and that each was contributing a full-length of Colonel
Tarleton to the Exhibition. " As usual," said the Morn-
ing Chronicle, " there is a proud rivalship between the
pencil of the President and that of Mr. Gainsborough."
Sir Joshua contributed fifteen pictures, including a
head of Mrs. Robinson, and a portrait of Colonel Tarle-
ton, in which he showed the soldier in an unconventional
LONDON, 1782 185
attitude, stooping to fasten a button on his knee as he
stands beside his horse. Gainsborough, in addition to
the rival portrait of Tarleton, sent his whole-lengths of
the Prince of Wales, Colonel St. Leger and Madame
Bacelli, and a fourth whole-length of Master Nicholls.
These were accompanied by half-lengths or kit-cats of
Lord Camden, Mrs. Fane, Miss Dalrymple and Mr.
Merlin, together with a landscape and the picture Girl
with Pigs. Bate, in prefacing his notice of Gainsborough's
pictures, upheld his chosen painter before all the world.
" The royal patronage seems to have had the most
happy influence in calling forth the full powers of
Mr. Gainsborough's pencil. The eleven pieces with
which he has honoured the Exhibition, if they are not a
satisfactory proof of the above assertion, demonstrate,
however, that this celebrated artist has soared with
genius to the highest regions of taste and may now
content himself with a professional fame that few will
ever arrive at, none excel ! "
After this prehminary flourish he gives a glowing de-
scription of his friend's landscape. " Mr. Gainsborough
has exhibited but one landscape — ^but that his chef
d'oeuvre in that line. It is an evening at sunset, repre-
senting a woodland scene, a sequestered cottage, peasants
and their children before the cottage, and a woodman and
his dog in the gloomy part of the scene returning from
labour ; the whole heightened by a water and sky that
would have done honour to the most brilliant Claude
Lorain." The picture thus described by Bate must be,
I think, the landscape now in the collection of the
Duke of Rutland, and lent by him for exhibition at the
Guildhall and the Royal Academy, when it was described
in the catalogues as The Woodcutter's Home. The de-
scriptive note appended to the title of the picture in
the catalogue of the Guildhall Exhibition of 1899, says :
" At the door of a cottage is seated a young mother,
nursing an infant ; six other children are gathered round
i86 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
her, and an elder girl is standing in the shadowed door-
way oi the cottage. Approaching from the right is the
woodcutter, laden with wood, and accompanied by his
dog. The right of the picture is occupied by a pleasant
landscape showing the outskirts of a forest and the
glistening light of sunset between the trees." The
Woodcutter's Home was possibly one of the three land-
scapes known to have been purchased from Gainsborough
by the fourth Duke of Rutland, for two of which he paid
£i6o and for the third, £60.
Bate has something more interesting to say about
the second pastoral canvas exhibited by Gainsborough
this year. He remarks, after praising the Girl with Pigs,
that Sir Joshua Reynolds, " whose liberality is equal to
his genius, the moment he saw this picture sent to
know the price, and purchased it, sending a hundred
guineas with half as many elegant compliments on the
work of the artist, who is said to have written back
' that it could not fail to afford him the highest satis-
faction that he had brought his pigs to so fair a market.' "
It is common knowledge that Sir Joshua bought the
picture, although he thought that Gainsborough might
have made the girl more beautiful, but Bate throws a new
and agreeable light on the transaction by his reference
to the President's letter with its half a hundred com-
pliments, of which no other record survives. Gains-
borough's letter of thanks is still in existence, and the
fact that Bate was able to quote a passage from it,
almost literally, shows how closely he was in touch with
the painter of the Girl with Pigs.
Nothing is said in Bate's article about Reynolds paying
a hundred guineas for the picture for which Gainsborough
had asked but sixty. Leslie, in his Life of Sir Joshua
Reynolds, says the increased price was probably the fruits
of a re-sale of the picture to M. de Calonne. But the
President had the picture in his possession for some
years, and did not part with it until after Gainsborough's
LONDON, 1782 187
death, when he sold the Girl with Pigs to De Calonne for
three hundred guineas " as a particular favour." Rey-
nolds thought highly of the Girl with Pigs, as we know
by a letter he wrote to the Earl of Upper Ossory in 1786.
The Earl had sent for his inspection a much damaged
canvas which Reynolds believed to be from the hand of
Titian. He says so in his letter, and expresses a wish
to acquire it with the view of improving its appearance
by repainting certain portions, which he thinks no one
but himself could accomplish satisfactorily. In a post-
script Sir Joshua adds : " I am thinking what picture to
offer you in exchange. What if I gave Gainsborough's
Pigs for it ? It is by far the best picture he ever painted,
or perhaps ever will."
The Girl with Pigs, which was the most popular pic-
ture of the year at Somerset House in 1782, was painted,
not in the country, but in Gainsborough's studio in Pall
Mall, to which animals of various descriptions were
brought at times. Parke, whom I have before quoted,
gives an interesting glimpse of the studio while this
picture was on the easel. He says : " Being acquainted
with Gainsborough at the period when this work was in
progress I have seen at his house in Pall Mall the three
little pigs (who did not in the common phrase sit for
their likenesses) gambolling about his painting room,
whilst he at his easel was catching an attitude or a leer
from them."
Gainsborough was applauded this year by the critics
for an improvement in his colour, in which they no longer
saw the glaring quality to which objection had been
taken formerly. In this respect high praise was given
to the portrait of Lord Camden, the great judge and
ex-Lord Chancellor, who had been the friend and patron
of Gainsborough at Bath. The colouring of this portrait
at the Academy of 1782 is described as being in its
sobriety in perfect harmony with its subject ; while for
the brilliant hues employed in the face of Madame
i88 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
Bacelli, Gainsborough was excused. As one writer
admitted, " the artist was not only obhged to vivify
and embelhsh ; but, if he would be thought to copy
the original, to lay on his colouring thickly. In this he
has succeeded, for the face of this admirable dancer is
evidently paint-painted." The Bacelli's portrait appears
to have been a good likeness, as several praise it for this
quahty. The Miss Dalrymple (Mrs. Elliott), whose
charms were displayed this year by Gainsborough on
a kit-cat canvas, was the notorious " Dolly the Tall " of
whom, it will be remembered, he had exhibited another
portrait in 1778. The comments on the expression of
this lady were most unflattering, although her beauty
was universally admitted. The Puhlic Advertiser
thought that Miss Dalrymple 's eyes were far too charac-
teristic of her vocation, and the shocked critic of the
London Courant exclaims, " A wanton countenance, and
such hair, good God ! " Gainsborough appears to have
maintained an extensive connection among the demi-
monde, by whom Sir Joshua and the other fashionable
portrait-painters of the time were also frequently em-
ployed. Severe things were said in some journals about
the too frequent exhibition of the pictures of these women
on the Academy walls. It was asserted that French
visitors to our exhibitions were shocked at the indelicacy
of placing, close to the portraits of women of rank and
virtue, the presentments of these notorious persons,
triumphant, as it were, in vice. " In Paris," remarked
one writer, " such portraits would on no account be
admitted ; the name of the King is a sufficient check
upon them to keep a just decorum in his Academy, and
it is no small reflection upon our Academicians here to
have as little regard for the dignity of their master as
they seemingly have for their own."
It has been supposed that the whole-length portraits
of the Prince of Wales and Colonel St. Leger, with their
horses, were commissioned by the sitter in each case,
LONDON, 1782 189
to present to the other ; but Bate's story, which is much
more probable, is that the Prince paid for both. " St.
Leger's furniture for his saddle has the Royal Star on it,
which the Prince gave him and insisted on its being
taken in the picture. They are both admirable like-
nesses, and Gainsborough has five hundred guineas each
for them. They are painted at the expense of his Royal
Highness, his own being intended for St. Leger, and St.
Leger's for himself." The price seems extravagant
when compared with those known to have been paid for
portraits of the same period, but there is no reason to
doubt the accuracy of the statement. It was unchal-
lenged at the time, and the writer was in the confidence
of Gainsborough, and perhaps to some extent in that of
the Prince.
The animal by which the Prince is seen standing in
Gainsborough's portrait was a Spanish horse and a great
favourite with its master. Of the painting of this horse
a story was told by an occasional contributor to the
journals of the day, who wrote above the initials " M.M.,"
and appears to have been on intimate terms not only
with Gainsborough but with Hogarth and other artists.
When Gainsborough was painting the Spanish horse,
" M.M." was in his studio watching the progress of the
work. He knew nothing of drawing and painting, yet
he was convinced that something was wrong with one
of the animal's feet, and his eye returned to it again
and again. However, he could not say exactly what
was the matter, but Gainsborough, when his attention
was called to it, saw in an instant where the error lay,
and after thanking his critic proceeded to correct the
offending foot. Gainsborough's friend, " M.M.," to whom
I shall refer again, says truly, " There are few painters
— except excellent ones — that can bear to be told of faults
in their pictures." He adds that Pine, " whose greatest
defect was ill-drawing, painted and engraved Garrick hump-
back, and though told in time determined to let him go so."
igo THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
Colonel Tarleton's equestrian portrait was less favour-
ably received by the public than those of the Prince of
Wales and St. Leger, and even Bate, who could see the
highest excellence in almost everything touched by
Gainsborough, admitted that the artist had sacrificed
too much to " the full-speed ideas of a spirited martinet."
Some of the franker critics compared the galloping
colonel with the performers at Astley's, another com-
plained that the hind part of the horse appeared to be less
active than the fore, and one impudent writer suggested,
with apparent gravity, that the portrait would make
an excellent sign for the " Horse and Groom " at Chelsea.
It was generally believed that Gainsborough had de-
signed this portrait upon a scheme of Tarleton's and
against his own better judgment. Thicknesse declares
that Gainsborough's attitude towards his sitters was one
of extreme independence, and quotes in support of his
assertion a story of an alderman whom the artist refused
to paint because his appearance did not please him.
But this is not borne out by certain incidents in Gains-
borough's career. The correspondence with Lord Dart-
mouth, quoted in an earlier chapter, shows how complais-
ant he could be upon occasion. In one of the letters,
which were written from Bath in 177 1 to excuse his sup-
posed failure to obtain a likeness in Lady Dartmouth's
portrait, Gainsborough says that, though the statement
may appear conceited, he was always able, before pulling
the trigger, to see the cause of his missing. " But
nothing is so common to me as to give up my own sight
in my painting-room rather than hazard giving offence
to my best customers." In the case of Tarleton Gains-
borough evidently gave up his freedom of sight to the
sitter, and a long letter, published by his friend in the
Morning Herald while the Academy was still open, seems
to have been written to prove to the public that the
painter of the " galloping Colonel " was not responsible
for the composition of the portrait.
LONDON, 1782 191
To Mr. Gainsborough
Sir, — I consider every man who exhibits a picture
as one who sets himself to receive either applause or
censure, according to the merits of his performance. I
leave it to the rest of the world to praise the excellence
of your Pigs and your Prince. The intention of this
address is to quarrel with you for hanging up that
enormous sign of the Horse and Jockey, said to be the
portrait of a gallant officer. I well know that those
who employ architects and painters assume a right of
advising and directing them, so that the houses and
pictures, instead of being the work of the artist, are in
general a miserable compound of judgment and ignorance.
Pray inform the public — for your own sake tell us —
whether you were the real designer of the picture above
mentioned. Was there no advice (which in this case
was equivalent to direction) upon the colour and attitude
of the horse ? Was the general disposition of the picture
your own choice, or had you, as I much suspect, no choice
in the business ? You will pardon my freedom in asking
you these questions in so public a manner, but the in-
troduction of this address is my apology.
As it is impossible to believe that an artist of your
very high rank can be pleased with a picture which a
very slight knowledge must condemn, we must conclude
that your complaisance got the better of your prudence ;
first in suffering your own ideas to give place to those
who were incapable of directing you ; and secondly,
after letting yourself down so low as to paint a picture
in such circumstances, to be prevailed upon to exhibit it.
I join in with the whole world in perfectly esteem-
ing your great works ; and, that you may produce more
good pictures, I hope all your employers will in future
resign their opinion to your judgment, and thus prevent
you from receiving other disagreeable addresses besides
this. — From yours,
Veritas.
The St. James's Chronicle, which is the only journal
that notices Gainsborough's Master Nicholls (The Pink
Boy) and Mr. Merlin, pays the artist a curious compli-
ment in the opening paragraph of its criticism. " Mr.
192 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
Gainsborough's residence in town has had an effect
which Rousseau says is very usual on genius — it has
given his productions a classic elegance which was the
only circumstance wanting to class him with the most
eminent painters this country has ever produced." The
Master Nicholls, described as "a beautiful boy in a
Vandyck dress, the grandson of the late Dr. Nicholls,"
does not meet with the entire approval of the critic of
this journal, who thinks the rose-coloured drapery in-
jurious to the general effect of the picture ; and of the
portrait of Mr. Merlin he says unkindly that " the subject
affords no great scope for genius." Joseph Merlin was
an ingenious mechanician, and as a maker of musical
instruments particularly interesting to Gainsborough.
Fanny Burney mentions that in January 1781, when
she was staying at Streatham with the Thrales, Merlin
came to the house " to tune the fortepiano." He was
at Streatham again in June, when he spoke of the
portrait referred to above. " During dessert," says
Fanny Burney, " mention was made of my father's
picture, when the ridiculous creature (Merlin) exclaimed,
' Oh ! for that picture of Dr. Burney, Sir Joshua Reynolds
has not taken pains, that is to please me — I do not like it.
Mr. Gainsborough has done one much more better of me,
which is very agreeable indeed. I wish it had been at
the Exhibition, for it would have done him a great deal
of credit indeed.' " It was perhaps at Merlin's request
that Gainsborough sent his portrait to the Academy
of 1782.
In September Gainsborough was at Windsor, painting
the Royal Family by command of the Queen. Towards
the end of the month it is announced that many of the
fifteen portraits are finished " in that superior style which
has long distinguished this artist's celebrated pencil."
A little later the Morning Herald is able to record the
completion of the series, and this agrees with the state-
ment of Redgrave, who, as Surveyor of 1he Royal Pic-
LONDON, 1782 193
tures, was at one time in charge of these portraits, and
says that they are all dated on the back as painted in
September 1782.
Later in the autumn Gainsborough's sitters included
the Duchess of Rutland, Lady Stormont and Lady
Priscilla Burrell, who in October are described as " the
natural and lively subjects that at present engross the
pencil of this celebrated artist." Lady Stormont, who
as the Countess of Mansfield has been immortalised by
Romney, was the younger sister of the beautiful Mrs.
Graham whose portrait by Gainsborough is now at
Edinburgh. Lady Priscilla Burrell was the wife of Sir
Peter Burrell, in whom in later years Gainsborough
found a generous friend and patron.
Gainsborough commenced in November his portrait
of Sir Joshua Reynolds, of which all trace appears to
have been lost. The purchase of the Girl with Pigs
earlier in the year, and the friendly correspondence
which followed that transaction, evidently brought about
some connection between the rival painters, for Sir
Joshua was sitting at Gainsborough's house on Sunday,
November 3rd, and he had an appointment for the fol-
lowing Sunday. But in the interval Sir Joshua was
taken ill, and after his recovery the sittings were not re-
sumed. Northcote says that they were only commenced
at the sohcitation of Gainsborough, and that the reason
they were not proceeded with was that Sir Joshua made
no offer to paint Gainsborough in return. Of this, adds
Northcote, Sir Joshua never had any intention, as he
heard him declare. Bate, on the other hand, while de-
ploring, after Gainsborough's death, that the portraits
were not painted, stated that " the canvas was stretched
for both." The two artists are not known to have had
any further communication with each other until they
met in 1788, when Gainsborough was dying.
N
CHAPTER XI
LONDON, 1783
Fifteen royal portraits — Gainsborough's letter to the Council — The
Academy — The Duchess of Devonshire at the private view — " By
no means an elegant woman " — Flattered in Gainsborough's
portrait — A missing portrait of her Grace — Gainsborough paints a
full length of her in forty-five minutes — The beautiful Mrs. Sheri-
dan — The portrait of 1783 not the Rothschild portrait— The
Shepherd Boys with Dogs Fighting — More friction at the Academy —
Lady Horatia Waldegrave's portrait — Unmentioned in the cata-
logue — Hung on the chimney board — Gainsborough's indignation
— Tries to withdraw his pictures — John Gainsborough — A tour in
the Lake Coimtry — Gainsborough commences The Mall, St." James's
Park.
Lord Rawdon (afterwards Marquis of Hastings and
Governor-General of India) and Lord Comwallis were
sitting alternately at Schomberg House at the beginning
of 1783. Each of these eminent soldiers had requested
Gainsborough to paint his portrait for presentation to
the other, and that of Lord Comwallis was intended for
the Academy Exhibition of the forthcoming April. The
portrait of Lord Comwallis now in the National Portrait
Gallery is probably the one painted by Gainsborough
at this time, and it is therefore interesting to know that
contemporary opinion considered it a good likeness. In
March the Earl of Sandwich, the First Lord of the Ad-
miralty, gave sittings for the full-length portrait now at
Greenwich Hospital, which was described as commis-
sioned by Sir Hugh Palliser for presentation to the
Hospital as a recognition of the First Lord's patronage
of that institution. Gainsborough's acquaintance with
Lord Sandwich (the " Jemmy Twitcher " of the political
paragraphists of the time) had commenced long before
these sittings. Several years earher Gainsborough had
194
LONDON, 1783 195
painted for Lord Sandwich a portrait of his ill-fated
mistress, Martha Ray, whose murder by a clergyman
on the steps of Covent Garden Theatre thrilled and
shocked London, and brought about a temporary quarrel
between Dr. Johnson and his friend Beauclerk.
The portrait of Lord Sandwich, like that of Lord Com-
wallis, was painted for exhibition at the Royal Academy,
and Gainsborough sent both to Somerset House in April,
in company with a group of works that was larger and
more varied in nature than any of the painter's previous
contributions. The pictures sent from Schomberg House,
in addition to the two mentioned, were whole-lengths of
the Duchess of Devonshire, the Duke of Northumberland,
Sir Charles Gould, Sir Harbord Harbord (afterwards
Lord Suffteld), and Mrs. Sheridan; a half-length of Mr.
Ramus, a picture of Two Shepherd Boys with Fighting
Dogs, a landscape and a seapiece, and, finally, the por-
traits of those members of the Royal Family whom he
had painted at Windsor in the preceding September.
The royal portraits, fifteen in all, were identical in size
and shape, and represented the heads and busts of the
originals on the scale of life.
Gainsborough sent two letters to the Academy about
the royal portraits. One of them, threatening in its
terms, was addressed to the Council :
" Mr. Gainsborough presents his compliments to the
Gentlemen appointed to hang the pictures at the Royal
Academy ; and begs leave to hint to them that if the Royal
Family, which he has sent for this Exhibition (being
smaller than three quarters) are hung above the line with
full-lengths, he never more, whilst he breathes, will send
another picture to the Exhibition. — This he swears by
God.
" Saturday Morn."
The second communication was a note of a more
friendly and private nature, addressed to F. M. Newton,
R.A., the Secretary, in which he explained exactly how
196 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
he wished the royalties to be placed. To make his
meaning clearer he sent with the letter a sketch which
is still preserved at Burlington House, showing the
fifteen portraits arranged in three rows of five each,
commencing with the King at the top left-hand comer
and ending at the bottom with the youngest Prince.
At Somerset House the rooms were thronged in the
first week of the Exhibition by what are described as
" crowds prodigiously great," and among the earliest
of the visitors was the beautiful Duchess of Devonshire,
who had come to see how her own portrait looked on the
walls of the Academy. The Duchess, who had been ill
recently, was now completely recovered, and " looked
and moved as well and as sprightly as ever." Her
portrait was naturally a centre of interest, but less so
than Gainsborough's studies of the Royal Family.
These were arranged in three rows of five exactly
as the artist had desired, with all the frames touching
and the whole forming in appearance one picture in
fifteen compartments. Hanging opposite to the entrance
of the gallery, the portraits attracted the immediate
attention of every visitor, but they were far from being
universally acclaimed, whether as likenesses or as paint-
ings. As in the case of the portrait of Colonel Tarleton,
exhibited the year before, it was felt that the artist had
painted the Royal Family, and shown them in such a
singular fashion, to please his patrons and against his
own inclination. " We can only say," remarked the
5/. James's Chronicle, " that these pictures are prettily
painted, but the various positions of the faces are by no
means well chosen. . . . The whole, even to the method
of framing them, is a childish conceit and by no means
worthy of Mr. Gainsborough. We suppose, therefore,
that it had another origin." The Morning Chronicle also
believed that the compulsive elaboration of such a work
could have had nothing to do with the painter's choice,
and that the affair must^have placed, -him in one of the
LONDON, 1783 197
most embarrassing dilemmas in which art can be in-
volved. " All that belongs to Mr. Gainsborough on this
occasion is the praise of extrication. He has contrived
to get off pretty well." The writer of this comment
said that of the portraits the Princess Royal's was the best
and that of the King the worst. Horace Walpole also
thought the portrait of the King unfavourable as a like-
ness. The Prince of Wales, he said, was very like and the
best of the set ; the Princess Elizabeth the next best,
and most of the rest weak and inanimate. Bate, of course,
praised the Royalties, but not too enthusiastically, and
by a curious chance mentions among them only the
portraits of the Princess Royal, Princess Augusta, and
Princess EHzabeth, the three " Eldest Princesses " about
whom Gainsborough was next year to quarrel irrevocably
with the Academy. Peter Pindar liked the royal por-
traits so little that he affected to disbelieve that Gains-
borough was their author, and wrote of them —
" For let me perish if I think them thine."
In this series of portraits the Royal Family was
completely represented, with one exception. This was
Prince Frederick, better known as the Duke of York,
who was travelling abroad when the rest of the family
were painted at Windsor. But there has always been a
tradition that Gainsborough painted the royal sons and
daughters without exception, and as no portrait by him
of the Duke of York is to be found at Windsor it has
been supposed that one must be in existence somewhere
else. Perhaps this may explain why more than one newly-
discovered painting, attributed to Gainsborough, has
been described as a representation of the Duke. As a
matter of fact Gainsborough never painted a portrait
of the Duke of York.
The portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire, shown this
year, was, I think, the only one of her Grace exhibited
by Gainsborough at the Royal Academy. In dealing
igS THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
with the pictures of 1778 I gave my reasons for doubting
the commonly accepted statement that he showed a
portrait of the Duchess in that year, and those reasons
are supported by some remarks on the Exhibition of 1783
by a contributor to the Public Advertiser. In a notice of
the Academy, he writes :
" We stopped in our article of yesterday near Gains-
borough's portrait of Sir Charles Gould, which not only
has much positive merit but has, besides, the absence of all
detraction from comparison, a circumstance which materi-
ally affects the judgments of Gainsborough's portraits of
Lady Horatia Waldegrave, the Duchess of Devonshire,
and Mrs. Sheridan, all of whom we have seen painted by
the President. Sir Charles Gould's portrait is not ex-
posed to this disadvantage of contrast, and is therefore
all the more satisfactory."
This suggests that the writer has no knowledge of an
earlier portrait of the Duchess by Gainsborough, and re-
gards the one of 1783 as the first the artist has yet shown
of her. The portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire by
Sir Joshua, with which he compares that of Gainsborough,
was at the Academy in 1776. It is unfortunate that
although the journals of 1783 contain many references to
Gainsborough's Duchess of Devonshire, none of them that
I have been able to find gives any kind of description
that would ensure the identification of the portrait.
The notices of it were not entirely eulogistic, and even
Bate, who in the previous summer had urged Gains-
borough so strenuously to seek his ideal model in the leader
of the society of the day, only says, " The portrait of the
Duchess of Devonshire is after Mr. Gainsborough's best
manner ; the attitude she is shown in is graceful and easy."
The Morning Post describes the Duchess as painted in
the same style as Mrs. Sheridan, but omits to say what
that style is. The critic of the St. James's Chronicle
speaks of Gainsborough's portrait as " A very elegant
picture of the Duchess of Devonshire, who in our opinion
LONDON, 1783 199
is by no means an elegant woman. There is a hoydening
affability about her, sanctified by her rank and fortune,
which has rendered her popular. Mr. Gainsborough has
given her as she might have been if retouched and
educated by the Graces." This description accords with
the simplicity of the portrait in Earl Spencer's collection
at Althorp, in which Gainsborough depicts the Duchess
wearing a modest white robe, and makes her, perhaps,
rather more slender in figure than she was in 1783.
Walpole's brief criticism of the Academy portrait, " Too
greenish," further identifies it with the Althorp canvas,
in the background of which green tones are carried even
into the architectural features.
Although Gainsborough appears to have exhibited
only one portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire he cer-
tainly painted at least three. Bate in his correction of
Thicknesse's anecdote mentions two, " one of which Lady
Spencer has, the other, we think, is in Mr. Boothby's
possession." Lady Spencer's portrait is presumably the
one now at Althorp and mentioned in the preceding
paragraph, but as to the other we can only speculate.
Why Mr. Boothby should own a portrait of the Duchess
is not clear, nor is it certain to which person of the name
Bate refers. Most likely he was the Mr. Boothby whose
name figures in a plan of the Opera House in 1783 as co-
tenant of a box \vith the Duke and Duchess of Devon-
shire, and this may be the same person mentioned by
Walpole as a leader, or would-be leader, of fashion, and
commonly known as " Prince " Boothby.
Unfortunately, nothing is known of the subsequent
history of Mr. Boothby's portrait of the Duchess of
Devonshire, which some may connect with the mysterious
" Stolen Duchess," bought by the late Mr. Wynn Ellis
seventy or eighty years ago for about sixty guineas and
sold at Christie's after his death for £10,605. The
portrait, a three-quarter length of a lady in blue with a
large hat, supposed to represent Georgiana, Duchess of
200 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
Devonshire, was stolen from Messrs. Agnew's gallery
in Bond Street in May 1876 and remained concealed for
twenty-five years, when it was discovered in America
and brought back to London. It was exhibited in Bond
Street by Messrs. Agnew, and afterwards sold by them
to the late Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan.
A third portrait of the Duchess is mentioned by
Bate, but this, apparently, was no more than a sketch.
" Hoppner the painter has a portrait in his possession
of the Duchess of Devonshire ; it was painted by the im-
mortal Gainsborough, and is one of the most hasty full-
lengths ever taken — the Duchess sat but three times for
it and was never longer than fifteen minutes at a sitting.
Mr. Hoppner has derived from this picture much real
benefit, for, by studying the freedom of the handling and
the clearness of the colouring, he has improved in re-
quisites he needed much." This paragraph was written
a few months after Gainsborough's death. Hoppner
appears to have owned a second work by the artist, as
a little later he was offering " a capital picture by Gains-
borough for sale by private contract."
Mrs. Sheridan (Eliza Linley), of whom Gainsborough
exhibited a full-length portrait in 1783, sat many times
to him both before and after her romantic marriage to the
statesman-dramatist. Gainsborough mentions her in one
of his earliest letters to William Jackson of Exeter as
sitting to him with her brother, probably for the ex-
quisite portrait, recently at Knole but now in America,
in which she is shown with the little boy leaning his head
on her shoulder. Mrs. Sheridan was the daughter of
Thomas Linley, a professor of music at Bath. William
Jackson, who, like Gainsborough, had known Eliza
Linley from her childhood, says that she was taught to
sing by her father at a very early age, and that she per-
formed in public before she was twelve years old. At
nineteen, just before the marriage which brought her
professional career to an end, her singing in the oratorios
LONDON, 1783 201
at Drury Lane captivated jthe musical world of London.
" The whole town seems distracted about her," says
Fanny Burney in the spring of 1773. " Every other
diversion is forsaken; Miss Linley alone engrosses all
eyes, ears, hearts."
Jackson, who seems himself to have been more than
a Httle in love with the exquisite Maid of Bath, says of
her beauty that to see her as she stood singing beside him
at the piano was like looking into the face of an angel.
" Her voice," he says, " was remarkably sweet and
her scale just and perfect ; from the lowest to the highest
note the tone was of the same quality. She had great
flexibility of throat, and whether the passage was slow
or rapid the intervals were always precisely in tune.
As she never willingly sang any songs but those of real
melody and expression, the goodness of her choice added
to her reputation. Her genius and sense gave a conse-
quence to her performance which no fool with the voice
of an angel could ever attain ; and to these qualifications
was added the most beautiful person, expressive of the
soul within. As a singer she is perished for ever, as a
woman she still exists in a picture painted by Gains-
borough."
To the grace and charm of this accomplished woman
many of her contemporaries have testified, and of her
extraordinary beauty Gainsborough's portraits are suffi-
cient proof. Which of these was exhibited at the
Academy of 1783 is uncertain. The distinction is claimed
for the fine full-length in the collection of Lord Roths-
child, but erroneously, I think, unless Gainsborough
painted two portraits of her similar in size and composi-
tion. Unfortunately, as in the case of the Duchess of
Devonshire, the newspaper critics give no hints that
might lead to a settlement of the question. One says
that Gainsborough has caught Mrs. Sheridan with her
best looks on, and that the drapery is finely touched and
rich in colour — but does not say what the colour is ! In
the Morning Herald Bate, the common friend of the
202 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
artist and the sitter, says that Mrs. Sheridan appears in
the picture with every advantage that painting can
bestow, and he, too, praises the rendering of the draperies.
But a third writer brings in the inevitable comparison
with Reynolds :
" Gainsborough's whole-length of Mrs. Sheridan is
by no means successfully imagined. Though the atti-
tude and disposition are tolerably different, yet the subject
being the same, it is impossible not to think of the Presi-
dent's highly-finished portrait of this lady. It is always
a disadvantage to Gainsborough when he is obliged to
try his skill after the more curious felicity of Sir Joshua."
If the Rothschild portrait is the one exhibited in 1783
it is much more than " tolerably different " from the
painting by Reynolds, which shows her at the organ as
St. Ceciha. In Lord Rothschild's portrait she is de-
picted in modern dress, seated in a meadow, and in the
absence of any proof to the contrary it seems probable
that this is not the one of 1783 but another study of
Mrs. Sheridan commenced by Gainsborough in 1785, of
which I shall speak in due course. In any case my re-
searches show that Gainsborough painted a full-length
portrait of Mrs. Sheridan which is unmentioned by the
artist's biographers, and has been lost sight of, it is to be
hoped, only temporarily. Some day perhaps it may re-
appear unexpectedly and cause a sensation at Christie's
akin to that occasioned ten years ago by the exhibition
of the Worthing portrait of Mrs. Sheridan in the famous
auction-room at King Street. I remember seeing that
portrait the first day it was shown and being struck by
its beauty. Its authenticity was obvious to anyone
acquainted with Gainsborough's work, but the canvas
was in such a bad state that it seemed doubtful whether
the bidding would be high. Its size was only thirty
inches by twenty-five, and there were holes in the lower
portion, one of them nearly as large as a shilling, but its
charm was irresistible, and Mr. Charles Wertheimer was
LONDON, 1783 203
accounted fortunate when he secured the prize for nine
thousand guineas. This portrait of Mrs. Sheridan was
sent to Christie's by a lady hving at Worthing who had
little idea of its value and none of the identity of the
person represented. She knew nothing of its history
beyond the fact that it was in the possession of her family
before she was born.
At the Royal Academy of 1783 all Gainsborough's
portraits of men, other than those in the royal group,
were highly praised for their likeness and characterisa-
tion. Bate says of the portrait of Sir Harbord Harbord,
Member of Parliament for Norwich, that it is so true to
the original " that if he represents his Norwich friends
as faithfully as he himself is represented we may continue
the pun and say he will deserve a good canvass " — a
joke that has served more than once in the history of the
arts. The portrait of Lord Sandwich was also admired
as a picture, but the noble Lord's personality was
evidently objectionable to the critic of the St. James's
Chronicle, the same writer who thought so poorly of the
looks of the Duchess of Devonshire. He says of Lord
Sandwich, whom Gainsborough shows with a plan of
Greenwich Hospital in his hand, that the face, figure,
and draperies are charmingly painted, but that " the artist
having directed his Lordship's thoughts, as the thoughts
of old and great sinners are sometimes directed, to hospi-
tals and infirmaries, his countenance wants that sarcastic
vivacity which has always distinguished him."
An amusing error in criticism was made by the Morning
Post, which, in dealing with another portrait, remarked :
" It is one of Gainsborough's excellencies that he is con-
stantly giving variety and novelty to his pictures, in
composition, drapery, &c., so that however his manner
may be discovered by some connoisseurs he will not be
readily traced by his sameness." The portrait the critic
was discussing was that of Lord Harrington, and it is
not surprising that he found some difference between its
204 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
manner and that of the ordinary painting of Gainsborough.
Lord Harrington's portrait was by Sir Joshua Reynolds.
The Sea-piece — A Calm (240) attracted little attention,
and even Bate was obliged to admit that it was not equal
to other subjects of a similar nature from the same hand.
Gainsborough had no high opinion of it himself, as he told
the Academy secretary that it might be put away in the
small room if necessary. On the other hand the Land-
scape (34) was universally admired. It was spoken of as
a triumph — " a fine example of the kind of work with
which his friends would like to see him occupied always,
and which he does con amore. Portrait-painting he
always seems to struggle through with the impatience
that indicates it to be considered as a task of duty."
The landscape at the Academy is described as a romantic
view with distant trees and a beautiful sky. " A precipice
is the principal object in the foreground, with several
figures, sheep, &c., descending to a rivulet that gushes
through a cranny in the earth." It appears at this Ex-
hibition to have shared the fate of many of Gainsborough's
landscapes in being hung too low, for it occupied a space
on the wall beneath his Two Shepherd Boys with Dogs
Fighting.
This picture of the boys and dogs was, in the opinion
of many, the best work shown by Gainsborough at the
exhibition of 1783. The artist in WTiting at this time to
his friend. Sir Wilham Chambers, R.A., the Treasurer
to the Royal Academy and the designer of Somerset
House, says : "I sent my Fighting Dogs to divert you.
I believe next exhibition I shall make the boys fighting
and the dogs looking on ; you know my cunning way
of avoiding great subjects in painting, and of conceaHng
my ignorance by a flash in the pan. . . . If I can pick
pockets in the portrait way two or three years longer
I intend to sneak into a cot, and turn a serious fellow.
I know you think me right and can look down upon
Cock-Sparrow with compassion."
LADY HORATIA WALDEGRAVE
(The " Fireplace " Portrait)
By peytnission of Mr. Hugh F. Seymour
LONDON, 1783 205
But for Gainsborough there was to be no next ex-
hibition. Before the opening of the Academy of 1784
he was to quarrel irrevocably with the authorities at
Somerset House, and that final quarrel was led up to by
the scandalous treatment of a picture at the Exhibition
about which I am now writing. The picture is unmen-
tioned in the Academy catalogue of 1783, and there is not
a word about the incident of its bad hanging and the
protest which followed in any biography or book upon
Gainsborough from Thicknesse do\\Ti to the present day.
In his first article in the Mornmg Herald upon the
Exhibition of 1783, Bate, after giving the customary
eulogy of Gainsborough and the list of his pictures, adds :
" Besides the foregoing is a portrait of Lady Horatia
Walpole, omitted to be mentioned in the catalogue."
The " Walpole " was, of course, a slip of the pen, excus-
able in the circumstances. Bate intended to write
" Waldegrave " in referring to this picture, to the con-
sideration of which he returns on the following day.
He begins a second long notice of Gainsborough's work
with an angry protest against the treatment of Lady
Horatia's portrait by the Hanging Committee. " On
resuming our investigation of Mr. Gainsborough's per-
formances it seems equitable to commence with the
portrait of Lady Horatia Waldegrave on account of its
being omitted in the catalogue ; and which, with the
best pretensions to pre-eminence, has the most humiliat-
ing position in the Academy, being placed against the
chimney-board of the fireplace. A respect for the fair
original would move one's indignation were it not that Mr.
Gainsborough has done her in every other respect all
possible justice. The likeness is very great and the
pencilling exquisite." Other critics speak favourably of
this portrait of Lady Horatia, and a writer, unacquainted
with the name of the original, mentions as excellent
" the lady under the miniatures." The Gazetteer supports
the protest of the Morning Herald in an amusing para-
2o6 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
graph which reveals the critic's admiration for Lady
Horatia's acknowledged beauty : " The situation the
portrait of Lady Horatia Waldegrave has at the Royal
Academy ; it being hung against the chimney-board,
is sufficient to provoke the temper of an anchorite ; and
although one must admit she would make a charming
companion for a fireside, it is not necessary that she should
occupy the very fireplace, particularly while she has it
in her person to kindle flames by other means."
Gainsborough's anger at the contemptuous treatment
of his work must have been increased by the recollection
of his rival's famous group of Lady Horatia and her
sisters, with which Sir Joshua had triumphed two years
earlier at the Academy of 178 1. For Gainsborough
there was no triumph, and little likelihood that even a
glimpse of his portrait would be obtained by many of
the visitors to the Exhibition. The position of the picture
in the fireplace was far worse than appears at first sight.
At the Academy Exhibitions of those days the miniatures
were hung above and on either side of the mantelpiece
in the great room, and as the miniature was fashionable
at that period, a crowd was almost always gathered in
front of the little pictures which, of course, needed close
inspection. " The miniatures," wrote a visitor of 1782,
" are not easily to be approached. We were, however,
near enough to see the heads of the Prince of Wales, Mr.
Keate, and Mr. Edward Tighe." In such conditions
Gainsborough's portrait in the fireplace must have been
hidden entirely during a great part of the day, and its
surface probably brushed by the ample draperies of the
ladies pressing forward to see the miniatures immediately
above it. That Gainsborough should have been indig-
nant was only natural, and a note published in the
Artists' Repository two years afterwards, shows that
the incident came near to bringing about the final
rupture with the Academy in 1783 instead of 1784.
The Artists' Repository of 1785, after commenting on
LONDON, 1783 207
Gainsborough's withdrawal of his pictures in the pre-
ceding year, adds : " He endeavoured to do so in 1783,
but was over-persuaded and left the Council in great
wrath."
The portrait so unfairly placed at the Academy is now
in the possession of Mr. Hugh F. Seymour, a great-grand-
son of Lady Horatia. It is a graceful study of the head
and bust of the beautiful girl, whose "gentleness, sweet-
ness, and modesty " so charmed her great-uncle, Horace
Walpole. The portrait, an oval in a square frame,
shows Lady Horatia in a white dress with a low bodice.
She wears a bow of blue ribbon at her breast, and a blue
fillet binds her powdered hair, one curl of which falls
on her right shoulder. Mr. Seymour has several other
portraits of his ancestress at later periods of her life,
one of which is a fine miniature by Bone.
In 1783 the Free Society of Artists held its last ex-
hibition at a room in the Haymarket. Gainsborough,
De Loutherbourg, Bartolozzi and Angelica Kauffman
were all represented on this occasion, perhaps out of good-
nature, with some faint hope of keeping ahve a little
longer a moribund association ; for neither credit nor
profit was to be gained by exhibiting at the Free Society.
Gainsborough's contributions were two landscapes.
A letter written by Gainsborough to his sister,
Mrs. Dupont, in the autumn of 1783, shows that the
prosperous artist was then giving financial assistance to
his eldest brother John, the humblest member of the
family. John Gainsborough, who spent all his life at
Sudbury, lived in Sepulchre Street (now Gainsborough
Street) in a house next door to that in which his painter
brother is said to have been bom. Philip Thicknesse,
in his book on Gainsborough, mentions calling at John's
house in Sudbury when he was passing through the town,
and gives a picture of the unhappy visionary living in
the meanest circumstances with a wife and seven
daughters dependent upon him. The ex-Governor men-
2o8 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
tions that although the family had beef for dinner they
had no bread to eat with it until he provided the money
to buy some. John Gainsborough was a crazy inventor
with perhaps a touch of the genius, and certainly an
overwhelming share of the eccentricities, of his brother
Thomas. He showed the charitable visitor a cradle
that rocked by itself, a cuckoo that sang all the year
round, and other curiosities of his designing. Thick-
nesse, in the temporary absence of John, asked his wife
if her artist brother-in-law sent them any money, and
she said that he did but that her husband spent every
penny on brass-work for his inventions. The book in
which these recollections of the visit to Sudbury were
given was written by Thicknesse in 1788, soon after the
death of Thomas Gainsborough, and they are followed
by some speculations as to what the unfortunate John
will do, " now that he has lost the aid of his excellent
brother, for, alas ! without aid he cannot subsist."
But the letter to Mrs. Dupont, to which I refer,
shows that the aid rendered by the " excellent brother "
was very small. Gainsborough, as all who have written
about him agree, was most generous to his friends, and
there are many stories of the careless way in which he
disposed of his pictures and drawings, and the contents
of his purse. Yet, in writing to his sister on September
29, 1783, he says :
" I promised John, when he did me the honour of a
visit in town, to allow him half a crown a week ; which
with what his good cousin Gainsborough allows him,
and sister Gibbon, I hope will (if applied properly to his
own use) render the remainder of his old age tolerably
comfortable ; for villainously old he is indeed grown.
I have herewith sent you three guineas, with which I
beg the favour of you to supply him for half a year with
2.S. 6d. per week ; paying him what day of the week you
judge most good. I should think not on the same days
that either sister Gibbon's two shillings is paid, nor on
those days which his cousin do for him. And that he
LONDON, 1783 209
may not know but what you advance the money out of
your own pocket, I have enclosed a letter that you may
show him, which may give you a better power to manage
him if troublesome to you."
In the letter he speaks of as enclosed, which was to be
shown to the recipient, Gainsborough writes :
" I beg the favour of you to advance half a crown a
week to Brother John, for his own use, from this
Michaelmas, and I will pay you again the first oppor-
tunity. I thought what I gave him when in London
sufficient to last till this time, which is the reason I did
not trouble you with a line sooner."
These letters do not show Gainsborough in a pleasant
light, John no doubt was regarded as an encumbrance
and something of a nuisance by the family generally,
but considering the ease and rapidity with which the
artist earned large sums, and that he had a wife with
private means, the half a crown doled out weekly to a
poor old man — for John was many years his brother's
senior — does not err on the side of generosity. It is
satisfactory to know that Gainsborough's daughter
Margaret subsequently behaved more charitably to the
last surviving child of her uncle John. To this cousin,
Ann Gainsborough, Margaret made an allowance of
twenty pounds a year. Ann Gainsborough, the last
surviving niece of Gainsborough who bore his name,
lived to be seventy-four. Like manj^ others of her
family she died suddenly. She appears to have inherited
some of her father's peculiarities, and lived alone in her
house at Sudbury. The woman who attended to her
came one morning in 1840 to light the fires, and guessed
that something was wrong as she could not hear her
mistress talking to herself, as was her invariable custom.
She had died in the night through the rupture of a blood-
vessel on the brain.
In the summer of 1783 Gainsborough went for a
sketching tour through the Lake country with his old
o
210 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
friend of Ipswich days, the attorney, Samuel Kilderbee,
who by his own account found the artist a dehghtful
travelling companion. The projected excursion, which
gave the artist material for several new landscapes, is
mentioned in a letter to William Pearce which shows
that Gainsborough, though not a reading man, must
have had some acquaintance with the poets :
" Kew Green, Sunday morning — Church Time,
" Dear Sir, — I don't know if I told you that I'm
going along with a Suffolk friend to visit the Lakes in
Cumberland and Westmoreland, and purpose, when I
come back, to show you that your Grays and Dr. Brownes
are tawdry fan-painters. I purpose to mount all the
Lakes at the next Exhibition in the great stile, and you
know, if the people don't like them, 'tis only jumping
into one of the deepest of them from off a wooded island,
and my respectable reputation will be fixed for ever.
I took the liberty of sending you a little Perry out of
Worcestershire, and when the weather sets in hot again
should be much obliged if you and Mrs. P. would
drink a little of it, and fancy it Champagne for my sake.
I doubt whether I can shake you by the hand before I
go, but when I come back I'll shake you by the collar if
you'll promise to keep your hands still. Most sincerely
yours,
" Thos. Gainsborough."
He was at home again early in October, painting a
portrait of the Duchess of Cumberland, the capricious and
haughty lady who gave Wright of Derby his only com-
mission during his first season in Bath, and nearly drove
him frantic by her vagaries, Gainsborough appears to
have been able to satisfy her somewhat exigent taste,
as the portrait of her Royal Highness, " in her robes of
State, with other paraphernalia of dignity," was finished
in November, when her husband, the Duke of Cum-
berland, took her place as a sitter at Schomberg House.
The portrait of the Duchess was intended as a present
LONDON, 1783 211
for the Prince of Wales, who himself sat this autumn to
Gainsborough for another portrait.
Bate now gives a piece of information of far greater
value and interest than the news about the royal por-
traits. The date of the painting of the famous picture
commonly known as The Mall, St. James's Park, has
been given by Fulcher and others as 1786, but a note in
the Morning Herald proves that it belongs to a period
three years earlier. " Gainsborough is working on a
magnificent picture in a style new to his hand ; a park
with a number of figures walking in it. To the connois-
seur the most compendious information is to say that
it comes nearest to the manner of Watteau, but to say
no more it is Watteau far outdone." The Mall was soon
finished, for in December a correspondent of another
journal announces the completion of " the very fine
picture Gainsborough has painted in a manner new to
him, the manner of Watteau. It is, we understand, for
the collection of his Majesty." The King, however, did
not buy The Mall, which remained on Gainsborough's
hands unsold until the day of his death. The writer
who reports the completion of The Mall is responsible
for a statement that Gainsborough was engaged at the
end of 1783 upon a full-length portrait of Mrs. Siddons,
but this is not corroborated by Bate. It is possible that
such a portrait may have been commenced experimen-
tally, but nothing of the kind is known to exist. Lord
Rodney was sitting to Gainsborough just before Christ-
mas, when the portrait of the Admiral is described as
being in point of likeness " one of the most exact imi-
tations of nature that was ever exhibited upon canvas."
CHAPTER XII
LONDON, 1784
Eighteen pictures for the Academy — List of the full-length portraits
— The Eldest Princesses — Dispute about its position — Gains-
borough withdraws all his pictures — His letter to the Hanging
Committee — The origin of the trouble — Said to be pohtical —
The Westminster election — Proposed new Exhibition — The
Duchess and the Westminster electors — The Academy without
Gainsborough — Hoppner an art critic for the Morning Post —
Gainsborough arranges a private gallery for his work — List and
description of the pictures shown — The Eldest Princesses — The
Mall, St. James's Park — The Prince of Wales's Landscape — Sir
Joshua Reynolds appointed portrait-painter to the King.
In the early days of 1784 there were no indications of
the forthcoming dispute with the Royal Academy Council
that was to deprive the Exhibition at Somerset House of
any support from Gainsborough in the last years of his
life. The unfortunate episode of the portrait in the
fireplace, if not forgotten was condoned, and the studio
in Pall Mall was full of pictures, finished and in progress,
which the artist intended to send to the Academy in
April. Everything seemed to promise well. The King
was sitting for another portrait, and the group of the
three eldest Princesses upon which Gainsborough had
been at work for some time was completed, and was to
go to Somerset House with seventeen other canvases,
one of which was The Mall, mentioned in the preceding
chapter.
Unfortunately no contemporary journal gives a com-
plete list of Gainsborough's intended contributions for
1784, but the titles of eight of them are to be seen on a
sheet of paper, yellowed with age, in the possession of
the Royal Academy. At the top is wTitten in the
CO
w
en
m
W
o
s
a,
H
m
W
Q
h-l
W
w
H
O
LONDON, 1784 213
painter's hand, " Portraits by T. Gainsborough, the
frames sent." Then follow in the order named, rough
pen and ink sketches of the portraits of the three eldest
Princesses, Lady Buckinghamshire, Lord Buckingham-
shire, Lord Rodney, Lord Rawdon, " two boys with a
dog — Master Tomkinsons," and Lord Hood. Finally
Gainsborough sketches what he describes as a " family
picture, Mr. Bailey," which is the well-known group
of The Baillie Family now in the National Gallery. He
writes below the sketches, " N.B. The frame of the Prin-
cesses cannot be sent but with the picture as their
Majesties are to have a private view of the picture at
Buckingham House before it is sent to the Royal
Academy." The sketches of the Buckinghamshires,
Lord Rodney, Lord Rawdon, and the Tomkinson boys
are ticked at the side in red, and in the same ink " come "
is written on the sheet to indicate that these particular
works or their frames had been received at the Academy.
There was every prospect of a brilliant display of
Gainsborough's work at the Exhibition, but it was de-
stroyed all at once by a notification in the Morning Herald
of April 22nd, that the artist had been obhged to with-
draw his pictures because the Council would not hang
one of them in a particular hght, although he had left
to their discretion the placing of all his other works.
This notice, which was accompanied by some vigorous
remarks condemnatory of the Academy's action, was
followed on the next day by an announcement in the
same paper that the picture in dispute was the portrait
group of the three eldest Princesses, the Princess Royal,
Princess Augusta, and Princess EHzabeth, painted by
Gainsborough to the order of the Prince of Wales for the
State Room at Carlton House, where a frame for its re-
ception had been built at a certain elevation into one
of the panels.
" The requisition the artist made," said Bate, " to
hang it at the same height in the Exhibition room, ought
214 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
certainly to have been attended to in so particular an
instance, especially when it is remembered that the
colouring is tender and delicate, so that the effect must
be destroyed by an injudicious elevation. Sir Joshua
Reynolds has very critically observed in one of his
Academical lectures that ' there can be no rule to obtain
excellence ; for if all the graces can be obtained by rule,
genius must be destroyed.' The full-length line of the
Academy ought on an analogy of principle to be always
excepted against when the work of a master, as in the
case of Mr. Gainsborough, requires a particular light to
do it justice in."
The secession of Gainsborough attracted great atten-
tion in the public journals, which were divided in opinion
as to the justice and wisdom of the Academy's treat-
ment of the artist. They differed too in their accounts
of the proceedings that prefaced the secession. Accord-
ing to the Whitehall Evening Post — which published the
news on the same day as the Herald — Gainsborough was
so exacting that no compromise with him was possible.
" It is not a little to be lamented," says this journal,
" that the Exhibition should be deprived of the landscape
pencil of such a painter as Gainsborough ; but though
the misfortune may be ours the fault is his own. He is
fastidious, and too tenacious of claims which probably
were exorbitant. The fact was this : He sent word that
pictures of such and such specific dimensions would come
from him ; he at the same time directed that they should
all have such and such particular situations in the rooms.
These directions were in part offered to be complied
with. Entirely to follow them was impossible. This
being communicated to Mr. Gainsborough he returned a
very laconic note that the Exhibition should have none
of his pictures by . . ."
The emphatic termination of this paragraph is not
unlike Gainsborough in some of his moods — the mood,
for example, of his letter to the Academy hangers in the
preceding year. But there is evidence that Gains-
borough did not write in this fashion to the Committee
of 1784, and the Whitehall Evening Post, though cer-
LONDON, 1784 215
tainly possessed of private information, was less accurate
in its statement than the Morning Post, which gave the
Academy version of the quarrel as Bate gave that of
Gainsborough. The Morning Post tells its story with
strict impartiality, and it agrees so well with what we
know officially of the affair, that the particulars were in
all probability obtained from some member of the
Council of the Royal Academy.
" The pubhc have to regret the umbrage which
Mr. Gainsborough has taken at the conduct of the
Council at Somerset House, as it will most probably
suppress the public exhibition of the works of that
eminent artist at any place. He sent six whole-length
pictures subject to the disposition of the gentlemen who
were appointed to arrange the different productions, with
information at the same time that he was painting
another canvas to contain whole-lengths of the Princess
Royal, Princess Augusta, and Princess Elizabeth, ob-
serving also that he should finish it in a style which
would not appear to advantage at a greater height than
five feet six inches, and therefore he desired to be in-
dulged with such a situation, even though it might inter-
fere with the general rule, otherwise he would not have
his picture exposed. To this he was respectfully an-
swered that a compliance with his request would break
through an established plan and derange the whole Ex-
hibition; they therefore hoped he would submit the
disposition of his intended picture to the principles of
the Society. The Council consists of gentlemen of the
most distinguished abilities — Sir Joshua Reynolds, West,
Copley, Loutherbourg, &c. — who might claim an equal
right of indulgence and take occasion hereafter to think
themselves offended had a precedent been established by
infringing on the general institutes of the Society."
The six whole-lengths mentioned in this article are
those referred to and sketched in Gainsborough's first
communication to the Hanging Committee, in which he
intimates his intention of sending the group of the Prin-
cesses after the King and Queen have seen it. No record
exists of the letter in which the hangers " respectfully "
pointed out the impossibility of complying with Gains-
2i6 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
borough's wishes concerning the position of the royal
picture, but a copy of the painter's reply to this com-
munication is preserved in the minute book of the
Academy Council. Gainsborough sent his letter to
Somerset House on the evening of the loth of April,
at which time the Council was sitting, with Sir Joshua
in the chair. The other members present were Sir William
Chambers, the Rev. M. W. Peters, Mr. George Dance,
and Mr. Barry. The letter of withdrawal which was
read to them was written in the third person :
" Mr. Gainsborough's compliments to the gentlemen
of the Committee, and begs pardon for giving them so
much trouble, but as he has painted the picture of the
Princesses in so tender a light, that notwithstanding he
approves very much of the established line for strong
effects, he cannot possibly consent to have it placed
higher than five feet and a half, because the likenesses
and work of the picture will not be seen any higher ;
therefore at a word he will not trouble the gentlemen
against their inchnation, but will beg the rest of his
pictures back again. Saturday evening."
The reply of the Council was sent immediately :
" Saturday evening, nine o'clock.
" Sir, — In comphance with your request the Council
have ordered your pictures to be taken down, and to be
delivered to your order whenever you send for them.
" F. M. Newton, Secretary."
The " established line " of which Gainsborough speaks
in his letter must not be confounded with what we call
the Academy line to-day. It was the rule at Somerset
House to hang full-length portraits above the level of
the tops of the doorways. The base of the frame of a
full-length would therefore be eight or nine feet from
the floor, and Gainsborough wished the Academy to break
this rule for him by hanging the Princesses three feet
lower. Cunningham's statement that he sent the group
" with the instructions to hang it as low as the floor
would allow " is absurd on the face of it. The names of
LONDON, 1784 217
the Hanging Committee in 1784 have not, I think, been
pubHshed before. They were Agostino CarUni, John
Richards, Francis Milner Newton, the Rev. M. W. Peters,
and George Dance the architect.
Although objecting to the undue elevation of a pic-
ture painted in tender tones for a particular position,
Gainsborough, as we have seen, approved of " the estab-
lished line " for strong effects ; and according to Sir
Martin Archer Shee he frequently forced the light and
shade of his pictures for the Exhibition, and toned them
down when they were returned to his studio. The prac-
tice appears to have become common, as forty years
later a critic in the Somerset House Gazette condemns the
constant exaggeration of facial effect in full-length por-
traits, and ascribes it entirely to the law that compelled
them to be hung at the Academy high above the ordinary
range of vision.
The Morning Post, at the end of the note from which
I have recently quoted, mentioned the rumoured inten-
tion of Gainsborough and others to organise an exhibi-
tion in rivalry to the Royal Academy, and more about
this interesting project was contained in an article in
the 5^. James's Chronicle. The article was preceded by
a letter which appears to be from the hand of ex-
Governor Thicknesse, who at this time was a regular
contributor to the journal in which it appeared. I give
it in full, as probably reflecting to some extent the views
of Gainsborough himself.
To the Printer of the " St. James's Chronicle."
Sir, — Being a lover of the arts I always visit London
when the Exhibitions of the artists are opened. On my
arrival on Saturday last I was much mortified to find
by the public prints that thirteen or fourteen pictures
from Mr. Gainsborough's pencil were withdrawn ; but
being unwilling to be deprived of the chief object of my
journey I repaired to his house and requested a sight
of them there, nor was I disappointed in any respect. I
will not attempt to describe my feelings on seeing the
2i8 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
various talents of a man whose genius in every line that
colours can shine in is so well-known, but condole with
the public for the loss it has sustained either by envy,
ignorance, incapacity, or obstinacy. I fear too it is not
only this year's harvest of genius which is lost, but that
Mr. Gainsborough will observe a line which men only
of superior merit can venture to follow.
The cause of this awkward business I understand to
be that the Exhibition Committee have drawn a line
to which all full-length pictures are to be mounted, and
consequently all judicious artists adapt their lights and
shades according to the appointed line and the degree
of light. But suppose the portrait of a lovely woman
of the highest rank, whose fair complexion and tender
features required the softest pencil and the lightest
shades, and that infinite pains had been taken by the
artist, at the request of a person of still higher rank, so to
combine the colouring as to suit a particular destination,
very different from the line drawTi by the Committee.
I say, suppose this to be the case, let me ask those gen-
tlemen artists whether the line might not, nay ought not,
to be broken to gratify the eye of the public, to do
justice to distinguished merit, and to show respect to
their First Patron? If not I would ask them whether
they can suppose that Mr. Gainsborough's judgment
could be so shut out or his vanity (if he has any) so
overcome his reason as to submit to such an illiberal re-
fusal ? As the case now stands, were I to draw Mr,
Gainsborough's future line it should be never more to
send out the handbills of his art. Men of true taste know
where they may see his paintings in such lights as he
wishes to place them ; and let those who are true judges
say who can place them in any light (ay, there's the sting)
in which they will not appear in a splendour not to be
equalled by any living artist, nor to be put out of coun-
tenance by any of the ancients. — I am. Sir, yours, &c.
A Lover of the Arts.
The article which immediately follows this letter in the
St. James's Chronicle throws a new light on the quarrel
between Gainsborough and the Academy. I do not know
whether the curious assertions contained in it have any
foundation, but no contradiction of them was given in
LONDON, 1784 219
the journal in which they appeared. The disputes about
the hanging of Gainsborough's pictures occurred at the
time when the long-drawn-out Westminster election was
in progress, the election at which Fox was returned after
one of the most desperate contests recorded in our poli-
tical annals. Gainsborough and Reynolds were both
entitled to vote, and the writer of the article attributes
to political causes the friction between the painters at
Somerset House.
He begins by lamenting that faction, which has caused
so much misfortune to England, has been unable to keep
clear of the Sciences and the Arts. Hence the frequent
degradation of the Royal Society to gratify Ministerial
spleen, and the ridiculous divisions which have rendered
the Royal Academy on the whole a material injury and
obstruction to the arts of painting and sculpture. Mr.
Gainsborough, says the writer, has been for some time
distinguished by the particular favour and patronage of
the Prince of Wales. In the contest for Westminster he
was early in his vote for Mr. Fox, " and it is possible
from a knowledge of the prevalent passion of Sir Joshua
Reynolds that he was not wholly unacquainted with a
stratagem, the success of which will never be forgiven."
The story is then told of the stratagem, the object of
which was to secure by empty promises the votes of
Sir J oshua and his friends for Fox. During the election
a noble Lord called at Sir Joshua's house in Leicester
Square to express the desire of " a certain young man "
(the Prince of Wales) to take the earliest opportunity
of showing his sense of the painter's merit. Sir Joshua
caught eagerly at the hint, and entreated his visitor to
use what influence he possessed to induce the Prince to
honour the Academy with his company at the dinner
which preceded the opening of the Exhibition. The noble
envoy then mentioned the Prince's anxiety for the suc-
cess of Mr. Fox, and said that if the President's vote and
interest were given in support of his candidate, he had the
220 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
strongest hopes of obtaining a promise from his Royal
Highness that he would attend the dinner. Sir Joshua
with five of his friends immediately voted for Fox, and
as soon as they had done so, were informed that the
Prince might after all be engaged elsewhere on the night
of the Academy banquet.
The Prince of Wales, as we know, was not present
at the dinner of 1784, and appears to have treated with
scant courtesy the President and his distinguished
guests. Among those who accepted the invitation of
the Royal Academy was Dr. Johnson, who ordered a
new suit for the occasion, and in one of his letters to
Mrs. Thrale gives some account of the proceedings.
"The Prince of Wales," he says, "had promised to be
there, but when we had waited an hour and a half, sent
us word that he could not come."
To return to the article in the St. James's Chronicle,
it is there stated that the story of the way in which Sir
Joshua had been tricked (and as the writer suggests
above, with the knowledge of Gainsborough) soon got
abroad, to the amusement of the President's adversaries,
and was the cause of " private ebullitions of sarcasm,
ill-humour, and rancour which occasioned a secession that
no doubt will be beneficial to the arts." The episode of
the voting for Fox occurred during the hanging of the
works at the Academy, and the writer hints that the
resulting friction caused Mr. Gainsborough to be refused
" an indulgence in placing some important pictures which
has been generally allowed, especially to eminent
artists."
Nor was the painter of the portraits of the eldest
Princesses the only man who had been badly treated by
the Academy. It was stated in the same article in the
St. James's Chronicle that " Mr. Downman, who has
made the most rapid progress in the art of portrait-
painting of any artist we remember, and who now dis-
putes the palm with the first painters of the age, has
LONDON, 1784 221
had his numerous and masterly performances returned
in the most insolent and contemptuous fashion. His
offence was only requesting that some curious drawings
might not be placed in the dark room on the ground floor
at Somerset House, which Sir William Chambers con-
trived — after some Chinese example, we suppose — to
conceal, not to exhibit the works of the artists. We are
happy to learn that many of the principal artists intend
to form a future exhibition in a room sufficiently large
and commodious, and not built on Chinese ideas (Sir
William Chambers, the designer of Somerset House, was
an authority on Chinese architecture) by the architect of
Somerset Place. The names of Gainsborough, Romney,
Wright, Sandby, Nathaniel Dance, Downman, Gardner
the portrait-painter, Cipriani, Stuart and Marlow are
already mentioned. And it is not to be doubted that
most, if not all the Academicians will join them, for the
sake of properly exhibiting the effects of their genius,
and of saving the company the fatigue of climbing to
the very top of an ill-contrived and miserable building."
Nothing came, however, of this scheme of founding a
kind of eighteenth century Grosvenor or New Gallery,
but Gainsborough and Wright of Derby both held pri-
vate exhibitions of their own pictures.
The Westminster election, which in the above-men-
tioned article is said to have been connected wdth Gains-
borough's quarrel with the Academy, was the contest
in which the Duchess of Devonshire, whose charms in-
spired the brush of both Reynolds and Gainsborough,
took part as a canvasser. There is a tradition that she
bribed a butcher with a kiss to vote for her candidate.
Fox, but in a circumstantial account of the incident
which I discovered in a contemporary journal the
Duchess is said to have kissed not one tradesman but
seven, and to have kissed them as Sir Joshua voted —
in vain ! The correspondent who writes the account,
and affirms it to be true from his own knowledge, says
222 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
that the " great lady " who was canvassing for Fox,
heard that seven friends of Lord Hood, the opposition
candidate, were to dine at the house of one of their
number in Henrietta Street. The dinner was at three,
and at half-past four, when the bottle was circulating
freely among the company, the Duchess's coach drew
up at the door. The fair visitor was shown in, and
after having " in her easy way removed the awkward-
ness of the master of the house," without further cere-
mony placed herself at the head of the table. A toast
was proposed, and drunk in Irish whisky punch, to
which the Duchess was unaccustomed, and after the
toast she proceeded at once to business by asking the
company to vote for Mr. Fox. The tradesmen declared
that they would do nothing unless they were bribed —
a kiss was proposed, and the lady kissed each man in
turn round the table. " And now," said the Duchess,
" you will all vote for Mr. Fox to-morrow ? " " Not
to-morrow," replied the host, " because we have already
voted for Lord Hood to-day, but we will vote for Mr.
Fox at the next election." "And have I then been im-
posed upon ? " said the indignant lady. " Have I been
kissing seven dirty tradesmen for nothing ? " The men,
now angry in their turn, declared that they would give
the kisses back and proceeded to do so, and the Duchess
had a hard matter to escape into the street, where she
found her carriage surrounded by a noisy and abusive
mob, whose members by this time had become acquainted
with the whole story of her adventure.
Against this strange story must be set a statement
in another journal that the supposed Duchess who went
about endeavouring to gather votes for Fox was " a
painted girl with a due share of impudence for the under-
taking, dressed up and put into a genteel hired equipage
with a ducal coronet and a servant in livery, who
assumed the name and rank of a celebrated lady, and in
that manner boldly drove about the town."
LONDON, 1784 223
In spite of Gainsborough's absence the Academy Ex-
hibition of 1784 was regarded favourably by most of the
critics, although some complained that it contained little
of interest except portraits. The Morning Post prefaced
its article on the Exhibition with an announcement of a
new departure in connection with that journal's comments
on the Fine Arts. " We intend in this paper," said the
editor, " to give a review of the productions of the
principal artists ; and in order to rescue the arts from
such ignorant and prejudiced accounts as have hereto-
fore been given in the public papers we have been pro-
mised the assistance of some artists of abilities and
judgment in their profession." Probably the " ignorant
and prejudiced accounts " the editor had in his mind
were those of Gainsborough's friend the Rev. Henry
Bate, for the feeling between the Morning Post and the
Herald was still bitter. No one has suspected hitherto
that one of the " artists of abilities and judgment " who
assisted the Morning Post with criticism and advice was
a painter no less distinguished than John Hoppner, at
this time a young man of six or seven and twenty, and
not yet a member of the Royal Academy.
Sir Joshua Reynolds showed sixteen pictures at the
Exhibition, some of which, according to the gossip of the
day, were only sent to Somerset House to fill up the
gaps caused by Gainsborough's withdrawal at the last
moment. They included Sir Joshua's famous portrait of
Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse, now at Grosvenor
House, and a portrait of the hero of the Westminster
election, Charles James Fox, who had been sitting at
Leicester Square in March. Fox's fair canvasser, the
Duchess of Devonshire, was sitting at the same time to
Reynolds, but her portrait, unfortunately, was not
finished in time for the Exhibition. The Academy was
opened on the 26th of April, but the portrait group of
the three eldest Princesses remained at Somerset House
until the 4th of May. It was then taken back to Gains-
224 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
borough's studio in Pall Mall, where it remained for two
years or more.
Early in May, when announcing a forthcoming exhi-
bition of Gainsborough's pictures. Bate makes a friendly
reference to the conduct of Sir Joshua that appears to
throw some doubt upon the remarkable story about the
Westminster election, pubhshed in the 5^, James s
Chronicle.
" Gainsborough," he says, " whose professional ab-
sence every visitor to the Academy so feelingly deplores,
is fitting up his own saloon in Pall Mall for the display
of his matchless productions, where he may safely ex-
hibit them without further offence to the sons of envy
and dulness. By-the-bye let it be remembered to the
honour of Sir Joshua Reynolds and Sir William Chambers
that so far from abetting the conduct of the Academy
hangmen, they have in the handsomest manner pro-
tested against the shameful outrage offered by these
fatal executioners to genius and taste."
Gainsborough's exhibition did not open until nearly
three months after this announcement, but in the mean-
time Bate lost no chance of keeping his friend's name
before the public. He printed some verses, nominally
on the Academy but in reality eulogistic of Gainsborough :
THE EXHIBITION, 1784
Whether to Richmond, Kew or Windsor
The King and Queen resort
(Whomever they may leave behind, Sir)
Their presence makes the Court.
Thus, tho' from envy or neglect
Or by some passion heated
Th' Academists with disrespect
Our Prince of Painters treated.
He shines with splendour all his own
Nor wants their poor addition
For where his charming works are shown
They make the exhibition.
This was followed not long afterwards by a longer poem
on the beauties of the portrait group of the three eldest
Princesses, and in June it was stated that the Prince of
LONDON, 1784 225
Wales, for whom the Princesses were painted, had given
Gainsborough another commission for a full-length por-
trait of himself in Huzzar uniform, A full-length of
Captain Berkeley was commenced about the same time ;
and the announcement of the completion of the portrait
of Lord Hood, now at Ironmongers' Hall, is followed by
some sarcastic comments by the editor of the Morning
Herald, who professes to be unable to imagine why the
Ironmongers should wish to perpetuate the fame of the
Admiral, " unless it be that the numerous anchors he
left off St. Christopher's were of general benefit to the
proprietors of the cast iron founderies." Hood, it should
be remembered, was opposed to the Morning Herald in
politics, and had recently headed the poll at the election
at Westminster, in which Fox occupied the second
place.
It was late in the summer before Gainsborough
opened at Schomberg House the exhibition of his pictures,
which he had been preparing since May. Thicknesse
says that of all the men he had ever known Gains-
borough had least of worldly knowledge, and a proof of
this want of knowledge is seen in the opening of his
exhibition at the end of July, when all the fashionable
people had left London. Gainsborough's exhibition has
been neglected by his biographers, not one of whom, so
far as I am aware, says a word about it beyond the fact
that it was not prosperous. Yet it was an event of great
importance, and if less successful than the painter's
sanguine disposition had led him to expect, was far from
being a failure. Gainsborough's gallery remained in
existence until his death in 1788. It was frequently
noticed from time to time in contemporary journals, and
many of the painter's later works were exhibited for the
first time on its walls.
However, to the exhibition of the first collection of
Gainsborough's pictures, opened in the last week of July
1784, Bate alone of all the newspaper critics appears to
P
226 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
have been invited. He made amends for the absence of
the others by writing a long and detailed description of
the exhibition, which he afterwards printed in the
Morning Herald. Gainsborough evidently gave Bate all
the information in his power for this article, in which no
doubt, some of the painter's own expressions have been
used. The explanation about the light and shade of
the group of the three eldest Princesses, its " tender
effect," and how the picture should be seen, is probably
Gainsborough's. He too must have explained the pic-
ture of The Park, or The Mall as we call it, and contra-
dicted the prevaiUng opinion that it was inspired by
Watteau. The following is Bate's description of the
pictures shown at Schomberg House in July 1784. It
is, I believe, the only record in existence of Gains-
borough's first exhibition :
A View of Mr. Gainsborough's Gallery
The illiberality with which Mr. Gainsborough's
pictures were treated by the Council who regulate the
hanging of the pieces exhibited at the Royal Academy
was such that, consistent with his own consequence and
honour, he was under the necessity of withdrawing them
from the Academy previous to the late Exhibition. They
are, however, of a nature too important to the improve-
ment of science not to merit public attention. The
following summary account we trust will prove acceptable :
The Three Princesses
This picture demands our first attention. The
Princess Royal is the centre figure. Her dress is of a buff
colour ; her Highness's waist is circled by a shawl, which,
falling over one of her arms, has the appearance of a
sash. Her hair is braided with pearls. The Princess
Augusta is on the right hand of the Princess Royal, in
a laylock dress fastened with a black girdle. The
Princess Elizabeth is on the other side. She appears
in blue and is represented sitting ; that position being
most favourable to her stature. The portraits are
recommended by the strict likenesses they exhibit and
LONDON, 1784 227
the very tender and delicate style of pencilling in which
they are finished ; the features have the softness and
beauty of nature, at the nearest approach, with a degree
of expression and character that gives animation to the
whole. The hmbs and other parts are rounded delight-
fully and sweetly to the eye ; but from their being calcu-
lated for tender effect, should not be surveyed at a great
distance. The figures are connected with the utmost
harmony and skill, and the drapery finished very highly.
Neither strong masses of light nor shade are to be observed
in the composition, and of course the transitions are the
gentler and more agreeable. The background is formed of
drapery, and a landscape enriched with a beautiful sky.
Duchess of Cumberland
The Duchess is pourtrayed in her State Robes with a
ducal coronet on her head. The likeness is strong. The
drapery and ground is in an unfinished state.
Duke of Cumberland
The head is sketched out, but not even the outline
of the figure is yet traced. (The three foregoing pictures
are intended for the Prince of Wales's State Room at
Carlton House.)
Lord Rodney
One of the most powerful likenesses that ever was
produced by the hand of a master. The character of
the original features lives in the portrait. The piece is
in an unfinished state.
Lord Surrey
A performance equal to the aforementioned por-
trait ; the head only is finished. His Lordship is to be
painted in a dress of the last century.
Captain G. Berkeley
This distinguished officer is represented in his naval
uniform ; one of his hands, in which he has his hanger,
is extended in the act of waving a boat to the shore.
The attitude is bold and the countenance animated.
228 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
Lord Rawdon
A characteristic portrait of his Lordship painted
in his mihtary dress and possessing every requisite of a
good picture.
Lord Buckingham
His Lordship is represented in his Regal Portrait
Robes as Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. The hkeness is
strong. The drapery is finished in a rich style and well
disposed.
Lady Buckingham
The companion to the foregoing. An admirable
portrait, in which her Ladyship has called forth all the
powers of Mr. Gainsborough.
Mrs. Douglas
This lady is represented reclining. An air of sensi-
bility and solitude is diffused over her countenance.
To the foregoing list of full-length portraits may be
subjoined the following of half-lengths and three-
quarters :
Mr. Methuen. Lord Stopford.
Mrs. Crofts. Lord Cathcart.
Mrs. Dixon. Mr. Loundes.
Mrs. Vane. Mrs. Fisher.
Lord Harrington. Mr. Howard.
Lord Hood. Dr. Warren.
The Beggars
This picture consists of an elegant building, in one
of the approaches to which is an ascent of steps, and at a
distance an arch through which a loaded mule is passing.
The principal objects are a beggar woman, who is re-
ceiving relief from a servant belonging to the house.
The beggar has an infant in her arms and one on her
back, and is also surrounded by others, some of whom
appear terrified at a dog who will not suffer their approach
to the house. Two children on the steps of the door are
represented making observations on the circumstance.
LONDON, 1784 229
A very fine summer sky is introduced. A vine is repre-
sented against the side of the house ; several pigeons,
also, are descried fluttering about the building. The
whole of which forms a beautiful assemblage of an
interesting nature.
The Park
Some have attributed this piece to be after the
manner of a distinguished master of the Flemish school ;
but the imitation being strictly from nature and the style
of colouring possessing every originality, such a definition
is without propriety. The view, although not taken from
St. James's Park, will perfectly well apply to that resort
of gaiety, and strikes a spectator as though the objects
were surveyed from Buckingham House ; and a view
of the Green Park was included. The Mall appears full
of company, broken in parties of five, three, and two, to
give diversity to the scene. Among these are all de-
scriptions of characters — ^women of fashion, women of
frohc, mihtary beaux, and petit maitres, with a grave
keeper or two, and a few accidental stragglers to illus-
trate the representation. Looks of characteristic signifi-
cation appear to be mutually exchanged by some of the
group in passing ; and others on the benches appear
making their comments. Some deer in the distance,
and other obj ects fill up the scene . The foliage of the trees
is well executed, and the sky is as clear and unclouded as
possible, to give the verdure of the boughs proper relief.
Landscape
This picture is, we understand, painted for the
Prince of Wales. The scene is an upland and valley.
Sheep, water, trees, broken ground, and other objects
are seen ; a solitary gloom diversifies a part of it, so as
to awaken corresponding ideas in the mind. The force
of language seems to fail in our efforts to give praise
to Mr. Gainsborough, who in every province of the pencil
discovers a genius stored with fine fancy and excellent
harmony ; and whether he gives a Shepherd Boy in
humble weeds or a Prince in military pomp, a woodland
.scene, or a prospect of the ocean, his labours are attended
with equal success !
230 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
Gainsborough's group of the Three Eldest Princesses
was the principal attraction at this exhibition, on account
of its subject and because of the notoriety that attached
to it in connection with the recent quarrels at the Royal
Academy, The picture still exists, but in a sadly muti-
lated condition. Painted for the Prince of Wales, it
was added to the royal collection of pictures after leaving
Gainsborough's studio, and was at one time in the charge
of some ignorant official who cut off a large part of the
lower half of the canvas to make the remainder fit into
a space above a doorway. This portrait group of the
Princesses was perhaps the " fine whole-length by Gains-
borough " which Landseer saw in the act of being cut
dowTi when he was at Windsor early in the reign of Queen
Victoria. He complained at once to the Queen, but it
was too late, and he understood that the Inspector of
Palaces who had mutilated the Gainsborough had burnt
the severed portion. Lord Ronald Gower, in his life of
Gainsborough, argues that the picture has not been cut
dowTL and is still in its original condition, but this idea
is evidently erroneous. As the canvas is now the com-
position is absurd, with the head of Princess Elizabeth
(the seated figure) low down in the right-hand comer ;
and that the picture was originally a full-length is proved
beyond dispute by the pen-and-ink sketch that Gains-
borough sent to the Hanging Committee of the Royal
Academy.
The portraits described as those of Lord and Lady
Buckingham represented the Earl and Countess of
Buckinghamshire. John Hobart, Earl of Buckingham
shire, was a diplomatist who had been British Ambassador
to the Court of St. Petersburg, and he had also acted as
Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland. Horace Walpole, who seems
to have liked him, though he had no great opinion of his
powers, nicknamed him " the clearcake ; fat, fair, sweet,
and seen through in a moment." He has often been
confounded with his contemporary the Marquis of
LONDON, 1784 231
Buckingham, who was also a sitter to Gainsborough.
The Earl of Buckinghamshire used to sign himself
" Buckingham " until the creation of the Buckingham
Marquisate, and the confusion was made worse by the
fact that each Peer had been to Ireland as Lord-
Lieutenant. Lord Cathcart, long afterwards commander-
in-chief of the expedition to Copenhagen, was the brother
of the beautiful Mrs. Graham whose portrait Gains-
borough exhibited in 1777. To the unfinished portrait
of Lord Surrey (afterwards Duke of Norfolk) I shall have
occasion to refer again, as well as to that of Lord Rodney.
The portrait of the lady described as "reclining" is
probably the Mrs. John Douglas which was lent by
Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild to the Academy Old
Masters Exhibition in 1874.
It is evident from the notes on The Park, as The Mall
was called at this time, that none of the figures represent
members of the Royal Family, as Fulcher believed. A
more reasonable account of their origin is that given by
William Jackson of Exeter, who says that " all the female
figures in his Park-scene Gainsborough drew from a doll
of his own creation." William Collins, R.A., the father
of Wilkie Collins, who owned Gainsborough's painting-
table, also possessed a little model of a woman " dressed
by the great painter's hand," and this may have been
the identical doll referred to by Jackson.
Allan Ramsay's death in August 1784 made vacant
the post of principal Portrait Painter to the King, and
Bate lost no time in urging that the appointment should
be bestowed upon Gainsborough. There was no one, he
declared, with equal pretensions. "No artist imitates
Nature with such softness, truth, and expression. No
artist living has so much originality or so strong a claim
as far as genius is concerned, on the Patron of Science."
Gainsborough, who had painted all the Royal Family
except the Duke of York, and had executed numerous
royal commissions, must have felt that he had a better
232 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
claim to the post than any other artist, but his hopes,
whatever they may have been, were soon destroyed by
the appointment of Sir Joshua Reynolds as Portrait
Painter to his Majesty. Gainsborough, however, was
not wanting in royal commissions, and the Prince of
Wales sat several times in the late autumn for the
portrait in the Hussar uniform, which was in an advanced
state by the beginning of December.
Gainsborough, who often found the models for his
pictures of children by chance in the streets or fields,
was walking near his house one day at the close of this
year when he was accosted by a beggar woman, who
was accompanied by a little boy of singular beauty.
The painter, noticing the child, gave the woman some
money and asked her to call upon him in Pall Mall on the
following day and bring her charge with her. She came,
and Gainsborough had the child washed and dressed
and was so impressed by his appearance that he offered
to take entire charge of him from that time forth. The
woman, who proved to be the boy's mother, asked for a
few days to consider the matter. At the end of that time
she returned and told Gainsborough that she could not
part with her child ; not, it appears, on account of
parental affection, but because during the preceding
twelve months he had earned by begging about seven
shillings a day.
The Morning Post published at the end of this year
an article on Gainsborough and Reynolds which is worth
quoting as a piece of contemporary opinion, and also be-
cause Hoppner was one of the critics attached to the
journal in which the article appeared. It is a compari-
son of the two men as portrait painters, and the writer
is imagining the result of sittings given to both artists
by the Duchess of Devonshire :
"Sir Joshua's portrait would not need the regalia
of nobility to point her out a Duchess. He would give
her understanding, grace, and everything but beauty ;
LONDON, 1784 233
but this he does not see in any person to the degree with
which he feels their other quahties. Gainsborough
with great abihty, in the honest bluntness of his heart
beholds her with all her imperfections on her head, and
paints her as he sees her. As it has ever been his endea-
vour to catch strong likenesses, so are his eyes perhaps
less directed by the influence of his mind, which has not
made him wander in search of ideal beauties to gloss
over the imperfections of nature. It would be ridiculous
to pass my judgment upon a subject which, as I have
mentioned, no two people think alike upon, yet I am
tempted to think that Gainsborough sees with more
truth than any of his contemporaries."
It is impossible to say whether Hoppner wrote this
particular article for the Morning Post, but years after-
wards he gave, in the Quarterly Review, an estimate of
the qualities of the two artists, which bears some re-
semblance to the opinion expressed above. Speaking of
Gainsborough and Reynolds, Hoppner said : " The aim,
as well as the power, of these distinguished painters was
different, and while the first was content to represent the
body it was the ambition of the latter to express the
mind."
CHAPTER XIII
LONDON, 1785
Lord Rodney and the bantam — A new landscape — The Prince of
Wales and Coke of Norfolk — Mrs. Siddons — Her portrait com-
pleted — The thirsty Speaker — Gainsborough paints the Beggar
Boys — Another full length of Mrs. Sheridan — Gainsborough and
the Academy — Rumours of reconciliation — ^The Cottage Girl with
Dog and Pitcher — Sold to Sir Francis Basset — Portraits painted
of Lord Maiden, Madame St, Alban, Admiral Graves, and
Lord Mulgrave — Gainsborough's palette — Asphaltum — Brushes —
Paints in dim light — Copies a Velasquez — A companion to The
Mall — The Cottage Children with the Ass — Gainsborough's house
at Richmond.
The notes in the Morning Herald are very valuable in
1785, as they give the dates, hitherto unknown, of several
of Gainsborough's portraits and pictures, including the
Mrs. Siddons now in the National Gallery and the famous
Cottage Girl with Dog and Pitcher.
Early in January Mr. Beaufoy was sitting in Pall
Mall for a full-length of the exact proportions of the
portrait of his wife which had been exhibited at the Royal
Academy live years earlier — the portrait that is now in
the possession of Mr. Alfred de Rothschild. Mr. Beaufoy 's
portrait was nearly finished by the end of January, and
considerable progress was made in the same month with
the full-length of Lord Rodney, which, in a sketchy state,
had been shown in Gainsborough's gallery in 1784. The
figure of the Admiral was almost completed, but much
remained to be done to the background of the portrait.
Bate says : " His Lordship's attitude is full of spirit,
and the likeness has the animation of nature. He is
represented on the quarter-deck of the Formidahle, and
near him a bantam-cock is introduced, from the circum-
234
LONDON, 1785 235
stance of one of those fowls having continued crowing
from the beginning to the end of the action of the 12th
of April." This was the great victory of 1782, when
Rodney captured five French ships of the line and sent
the admiral of the defeated squadron, the Count de
Grasse, prisoner to England.
In the interv'als between the painting of these por-
traits Gainsborough completed another landscape, which
was declared by his admirers to place at a distance all
his earlier works of the same kind, and even surpassed
the picture of the Woodman at Mistley Hall. This pic-
ture showed a farm cart returning from market in the
evening, with figures " finished in the highest style of
pencilling." The Woodman mentioned in connection
with it was not the Woodman afterwards purchased by
the Earl of Gainsborough. It was an earlier work, one
of two or three pictures known by the same title, and
once belonged to Giardini the violinist. At the time
Bate WTote about it the Woodman had passed from the
hands of Giardini into those of Mr. Rigby, the hard-
drinking Paymaster of the Forces, at whose house at
Mistley, in Essex, Sir Joshua Reynolds was a not in-
frequent visitor.
One of the commissions accepted by Gainsborough
early in 1785 was to paint an equestrian portrait of the
Prince of Wales. The commission was given by Mr.
Thomas Coke of Norfolk, the eminent agriculturist,
afterwards created Earl of Leicester. He was at this
time on intimate terms with the Prince of Wales, who
promised that he would sit for the portrait, which was
intended to hang at Holkham as a pendant to the eques-
trian portrait of the Due d'Aremberg by Vandyke in
Mr. Coke's possession. Of the Prince's portrait, as of
the landscape mentioned above, I shall have occasion
to speak again.
Gainsborough, however, when he accepted Mr. Coke's
commission, was painting the portrait of a far more
236 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
attractive and interesting personality than the heir to
the throne. Sir Joshua had shown at the recent Exhi-
bition of the Royal Academy his portrait of Mrs. Siddons
as the Tragic Muse, the work that Lawrence described
as the finest female portrait in the world, and this was
now to be challenged by the President's rival. Mrs.
Siddons was sitting to Gainsborough in March, and her
portrait was in a forward state by the middle of the
month and finished before its close. Bate, who had
known Mrs. Siddons since the days when he went to see
her at Cheltenham as the envoy of Garrick, says of the
just completed portrait which he had seen in Gains-
borough's studio : " The resemblance is admirable, and
the features are without that theatrical distortion which
several painters have been fond of delineating. In addi-
tion to the great force and likeness which the portrait
possesses, the new style of the drapery may be mentioned.
Mrs. Siddons's dress is particularly novelle, and the fur
round her cloak and fox-skin muff are most happy
imitations of nature."
The portrait thus described is the one in the National
Gallery, where it has been hanging since 1862, when the
trustees were fortunate enough to purchase it for a
thousand pounds from Major Mair, the husband of one
of the grand-daughters of the actress. According to
Fanny Kemble, who was a niece of Mrs. Siddons, the
portrait, charming as it appears to us, is not in its
original condition. She says of this work of Gains-
borough's, which for many years adorned her father's
house : " The restoration of that beautiful painting has
destroyed the delicate charm of its colouring, which was
perfectly harmonious, and has as far as possible made
it coarse and vulgar ; before it had been spoiled not even
Sir Joshua's Tragic Muse seemed to me so noble and
beautiful a representation of my aunt's beauty as that
divine picture of Gainsborough's." That the portrait
is like the original there is other evidence besides that of
MRS. SIDDONS
National Gallery
LONDON, 1785 237
Bate and Fanny Kemble. Mrs. Jameson, the intimate
friend of Fanny Kemble, wrote of this portrait of Mrs.
Siddons : " Two years before her death I remember
seeing her when seated near this picture, and looking
from one to the other it was like her still at the age of
seventy." With Sir Joshua's portrait— considering it
as a likeness — contemporary critics were less pleased, and
Northcote thought the President had not done Mrs.
Siddons justice in the Tragic Muse.
Gainsborough's portrait of Mrs. Siddons was not
painted for her, as some have supposed. It was painted
for sale, and remained for a long time in Gainsborough's
gallery awaiting a purchaser. More than a year after
it was finished, a critic, who had just returned from visit-
ing the studio at Schomberg House, remarks that " the
unpurchased portrait of Mrs. Siddons — with all the
graces of private station — still adorns the ante-room,
and will adorn it for some time, we fear, so prevalent is
the striking form of action and of character over the mild
and unimpassioned deportment of private life." How-
ever, it could not have been the " private " nature of the
portrait of Mrs. Siddons that prevented it from being
sold, for Reynolds found the same difficulty in disposing
of his Tragic Muse. Long after it was shown at the
Academy Bate described it as still remaining on the
President's hands, and added, with a mischievous re-
minder of the fleeting hues of Sir Joshua's pictures,
that it would soon arrive at that period when it would,
like all his best subjects, " come off with flying colours."
Sir Wolfran Cornwall, the dignified but self-indulgent
Speaker of the House of Commons, sat in April, when
Gainsborough painted him full-length and wearing his
robes of office. The Speaker was a thirsty soul who con-
stantly imbibed malt Hquor from a pewter pot while
engaged in his duties, and frequently slumbered during
a lengthy sitting. His fruitless efforts to keep awake
are satirised in some amusing lines in The Rolliad.
238 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
" Like sad Prometheus fastened to the rock
In vain he looks for pity to the clock ;
In vain the powers of strengthening porter tries
And nods to Bellamy for fresh supplies."
Gainsborough evidently managed to keep Sir Wolfran
awake, for his portrait of the Speaker is praised by con-
temporaries for its Uving and alert aspect. Young Lord
Damley's portrait was completed in this month ; at the
end of which the beautiful painting of Lady Sheffield
(now in Miss Alice de Rothschild's collection) was " daily
awakening into perfection, with all the external grace
and elegance of nature." To the Spring of 1785 also
belongs the picture of the Beggar Boys, of which the
Duke of Newcastle is the present owner. The boys were
painted from the model who sat for the much-admired
work, A Shepherd, which had been shown at the
Academy four years earlier. The model was apparently
a street urchin picked up by Gainsborough in the
neighbourhood of his house, as one of the critics of 178 1
mentioned the Shepherd half scornfully as a picture of
a beggar boy of St. James's Street. Yet another im-
portant work of this extraordinarily prolific springtime
was the portrait of Mrs. Sheridan, to which I have already
referred when speaking of the earlier version exhibited
in 1783. Of the one of 1785 a critic writes " Mr. Gains-
borough is engaged on a portrait of Mrs. Sheridan. It is
a full-length. She is painted under the umbrage of a
romantic tree, and the accompanying objects are de-
scriptive of retirement. The likeness is powerful, and is
enforced by a characteristic expression which equals
the animation of nature." This portrait of 1785 must
be, I think, Lord Rothschild's, as in another note, referring
to the same picture, Mrs. Sheridan is described as " rest-
ing under the trees."
As the day for the opening of the Royal Academy
approached public curiosity became excited as to whether
Gainsborough would maintain his proud and unrelenting
LONDON, 1785 239
attitude towards' Somerset House. Paragraphs dealing
with the subject appeared in most of the journals, but
they were as a rule purely speculative. " We are in-
formed by an artist of eminence," said one of the evening
papers, " that the Exhibition at Somerset House will be
far superior to anything the public may expect unaided
by the productions of the excellent Gainsborough.
Though from the same authority we understand that
such reciprocal overtures have been made between that
artist and the Royal Academicians as may restore to their
collection the excellent efforts of his astonishing genius."
This led to inquiries on the part of the Public Advertiser,
which for some reason showed special interest in the
matter, but was obliged to admit that it was unable to
discover whether or not the difference between the
dignitaries of the Academy had been compromised.
However the same journal, a fortnight before the opening
of the Academy, ventured to announce a reconcilia-
tion. " Gainsborough, not so fastidious and unreason-
able as last year, no longer holds aloof, and — of course, if
they are well finished — the art will be enriched with an
admirable landscape or two, his very curious picture of
the Park, and some portraits, as of the Siddons, Mrs.
Sheridan sitting in a wood, the young Lord Damley,
&c." But all this time the Morning Herald — the only
newspaper that enjoyed the confidence of Gainsborough
— was silent as to his intentions concerning the Academy,
and when the Exhibition opened its doors it was found
that the Public Advertiser had been mistaken and that
reconciliation was as far off as ever.
Gainsborough's obstinacy was regretted by most of
the critics, although the Morning Post declared that his
absence and that of Romney were not felt so much as
the non-appearance of Wright of Derby ! The same
paper considered that the Exhibition contained less
rubbish than that of 1784, " which was a disgrace to the
Academic ground," but critics disagreed in those days
240 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
as in our own, and the General Advertiser had nothing
good to say of Somerset House.
"It is an old saying," wrote a correspondent of this
journal, " and often happens to be the fact, that ' what
everybody says must be true,' and it is verified of the
pictures at Somerset House, which are confessedly
allowed, in the tout ensemble, to be the worst collection
that ever disgraced the walls of the Academy. To
partiality in the direction — to open affronts given to
men of genius — to the total absence of Gainsborough,
of Wright, of Romney, who are disgusted with the
Government in the Academy — this melancholy appear-
ance of decline is partly owing. In vain does Sir Joshua
raise from obscurity pictures which he has long since
finished, in vain does he cover the walls with his own
paintings ; for certain it is that the Royal Academy
must in a few years be totally deserted by men of merit
unless some step is taken to recall the absentees and to
cherish genius wherever it is to be found. Much allow-
ance, no doubt, is to be made for the necessity of the
case, and pictures, it is allowed, have been admitted
which would have been rejected in former times on
account of vacancies which must otherwise have appeared
on many parts of the wall of the Great Room. Many of
our readers may think us severe in our criticism, but if
they look to the cause with attention they will find that
the effect is natural and just."
The Public Advertiser, perhaps sore about its mis-
statement concerning the Academy and Gainsborough,
bestows a sarcastic comment on that artist in a para-
graph of general reproach to the Somerset House ab-
sentees. " Of Romney panegyric — though due to him
next to Reynolds — cannot enter here. He chances to
be what Gainsborough (of no moment but for his land-
scapes and his oddities) perversely chooses to be — no
public contributor to the support of his sustaining art."
Sir Joshua sent sixteen pictures to the Academy in
1785, including a portrait of the Prince of Wales, which
Bate declared had been altered at his suggestion just
before it was sent to Somerset House. He said that when
LONDON, 1785 241
the portrait stood in Sir Joshua's gallery its drapery
consisted of a scarlet greatcoat, but that this was changed
to a " close " dress owing to a hint given by him, and that
the change was without doubt an improvement. The
President was severely criticised in more journals than
one for hanging in a prominent place in the Academy a
full-length portrait of the notorious Mrs. Smith, who
afterwards married Sir John Lade, a nephew of Dr.
Johnson's friend Thrale, the brewer. The portrait of
Mrs. Smith, who, as Lady Lade, figures in one of Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle's romances, was the subject of
frequent comments while it remained at Somerset
House, Its close proximity to a religious picture by
West called forth many comparisons of an irreverent
nature, and the vulgarity of the lady's appearance was
remarked with painful frankness.
Meanwhile Gainsborough, unaffected by the storms
that raged in and around the Academy, was at work
upon a picture which, in the opinion of those who saw it
in progress, promised to rank with the best of the pastoral
subjects he had already produced. The picture was the
Cottage Girl with Dog and Pitcher, the date of which has
been until now a matter of dispute. Some writers on
Gainsborough have assigned this work to his Bath period
(1759-1774), but a contemporary note shows that it was
painted in the spring of 1785.
" The pencil of Mr. Gainsborough is at present occu-
pied on a subject which promises to rival his Shepherd
Boy ; it is a young peasant girl on her way to a brook
to fetch water. Under one of her arms a little dog is
borne ; the position of the animal is extremely natural
and pleasing. A cottage is shown in the distance, and a
charming landscape, with sheep and pastoral objects,
fill the expanse."
The Cottage Girl with Dog and Pitcher was finished in
the last days of May 1785, and sold a week or two later
for two hundred guineas to Sir Francis Basset (after-
Q
242 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
wards Lord de Dunstanville). It is still in the possession
of the Basset family. This picture was exhibited with
a large number of other works by Gainsborough at the
British Institution in 1814, and was seen there by C. R.
Leslie, R.A., who says in his Handbook for Young
Painters :
" Gainsborough's barefoot child on her way to the well,
with her little dog under her arm, is unequalled by any-
thing of the kind in the world. I recollect it at the
British Gallery, forming part of a very noble assemblage
of pictures, and I could scarcely look at or think of any-
thing else in the rooms. This inimitable work is a por-
trait, and not of a peasant child but a young lady, who
appears also in his picture of the girl with pigs which
Sir Joshua purchased."
Leslie's opinion of the beauty of this work has been
endorsed generally by most of the painters who have
followed him ; but Hazlitt, who also saw the picture at
the British Institution, criticised it with some severity.
He admitted that the Girl going to the Well, as it is de-
scribed in the catalogue of 1814, was the general favourite ;
and the attitude of the girl impressed him as being per-
fectly easy and natural. " But there is a consciousness
in the turn of the head, and a sentimental pensiveness
in the expression which is not taken from nature, but
intended as an improvement on it ! There is a regular
insipidity, a systematic vacancy, a round; unvaried
smoothness to which real nature is a stranger, and which
is only an idea existing in the painter's mind." Of what
he calls Gainsborough's "fancy pictures," Hazlitt pre-
ferred the Cottage Children. This is the work in the
collection of Lord Carnarvon, now known as the Wood
Gatherers, and painted, as I shall show later, in 1787.
Leslie, in his remarks quoted above, says that it was
a young lady and not a peasant child who sat for the
hgure both in the Cottage Girl with Dog and Pitcher and
the Girl inth Pigs. Apparently this is a mistake, as
LONDON, 1785 243
Bate says definitely that the Cottage Girl was a young
peasant, and that Gainsborough made her acquaintance
near Richmond Hill, where he met her carrying under
her arm the puppy which he painted with her in 1785.
The same girl could not, therefore, have sat for the
picture purchased by Sir Joshua, which was painted
more than three years earlier.
Among the sitters at Schomberg House in June 1785
were Lord Maiden, afterwards the fifth Earl of Essex,
who appears at this time to have enjoyed an uncommon
reputation for rakishness ; and Madame St. Alban. "Lord
Maiden is at this time sitting to Mr. Gainsborough for his
portrait, that when the Ladies of Cypria next lose their
favourite they may console themselves with his picture,
and contemplate the copy when he is far away." Lord
Maiden, a few years previously, had been connected
with the affairs of another sitter of Gainsborough's, the
beautiful Perdita Robinson. If some of the memoirs of
that lady are to be trusted it was Lord Maiden, " young,
pleasing, and perfectly accomplished," who was the in-
termediary when Perdita 's intrigue began with the
Prince of \^ ales, and was present at the first romantic
interview of the two on the river-bank near Kew Palace.
Madame St. Alban may have been the lady who
had already sat to Gainsborough in 1778 and 1782, the
notorious Mrs. ElKott (Miss Dalrymple). Walpole speaks
of her as afterwards known by the name of St. Alban.
However, the tactful editor of the Morning Herald
makes no reference to the past of Madame St. Alban,
whom he mentions politely as " a successful cruiser on
the Cyprian coast," so successful, indeed, that she dis-
played in her jewels "a splendour that might almost
rival that of the Emperor of the East, for each hand aches
with the treasure it carries. Large bracelets consisting
of an enamelled azure ground studded over with bril-
liants — a miniature of the starry heavens, and bounded
with an horizon of diamonds, with oval rings made of
244 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
similar materials at every joint." Bate approves of her
taste in jewels, but protests against her pushing her
conquests under false colours — with enamel on her face
an inch thick. Madame St. Alban was one of the many
painted ladies whose charms Gainsborough depicted.
She is described, while sitting to him, as surveying with
a triumphant air the portrait of the toe-poised Bacelli
which was then hanging in the studio of the artist. The
Bacelli — as thickly enamelled as Madame St. Alban
herself — was the Italian dancer already referred to as
pirouetting on the stage of the Paris Opera House while
wearing the Garter ribbon of the British Ambassador,
the Duke of Dorset. Her portrait was shown at the
Academy of 1782, and it is curious that it should still
be in Gainsborough's studio three years after\vards.
Presumably the Duke of Dorset paid for it, as he did
for the portrait of the same lady by Reynolds, for it is
hardly likely that Gainsborough would paint a whole-
length of the Bacelli for friendship's sake, or as a specu-
lation in the hope of selHng it, as he did that of Mrs.
Siddons. The portrait was perhaps temporarily in his
studio to retouch or varnish.
During the summer two portraits by Gainsborough
were placed in public buildings in the City. That of the
Duke of Northumberland, shown wearing his Garter
robes, was hung in the principal room of the newly built
Hicks' Hall (the Sessions House of the County of Middle-
sex), and that of Lord Hood, painted in the preceding
year, in the Ironmongers' Hall, where it still remains.
August witnessed the completion of the portraits of
two eminent seamen, Admiral Graves and Lord Mulgrave.
Of the first Bate says : " It is an excellent portrait of
that unaffected officer, whose professional merit has
suffered somewhat by detraction, but who will long be
revered by a body of the navy of the first respect, to
whom his worth is known." Admiral Graves, who had
fought under Anson and Rodney, brought back a squadron,
LONDON, 1785 245
chiefly of prizes, after Rodney's victory in April 1782,
and lost his own ship, the Ramilics, on the voyage. His
proceedings had been the subject of some criticism, but
a few years later he distinguished himself by leading the
van of Lord Howe's fleet in the action of June i, 1794,
and was raised to the peerage as Lord Graves. Lord
Mulgrave was an eminent Arctic explorer as well as the
friend of all the wits and men of learning of his day. He
figures in one of Sir Joshua's portrait groups of the
members of the Dilettanti Society.
WTien the portraits of the two sailors were being
painted it was promised in the Morning Herald that
" The Stanzas on the Palette belonging to the celebrated
Mr. Gainsborough " should appear in a few days, but
something appears to have prevented the publication of
the stanzas, as they are not to be found in the columns
of Bate's journal. The omission is unfortunate, for they
might have thrown some light upon the composition
of a palette about which there is no information that
can be relied upon. All that is known on the subject is
to be found in the recollections of the Rev. Mr. Trimmer,
a son of the clergyman who was the acquaintance of
Turner, and a descendant of Joshua Kirby, Gainsborough's
Ipswich friend. Mr. Trimmer knew ]\ir. Briggs, a young
artist, who was the near neighbour of Gainsborough's
daughter Margaret in the later years of her life, and
obtained from her several works from the hand of the
great painter.
Mr. Trimmer, who gave considerable information
about Turner to Thornbury for his biography of the
landscape painter, also sent him some notes about
Gainsborough, and says of his palette :
" This I had from Mr. Briggs, but have lost it ; still, as I
have copied several Gainsboroughs, I think I can furnish you
with it. Yellows : yellow-ochre, Naples yellow, yellow lake,
and for his high lights (but very seldom) some brighter
yellow, probably a preparation of orpiment, raw sienna ;
246 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
Reds : vermilion, ]ight red, Venetian, and the lakes ;
Browns : burnt sienna, cologne earth (this he used very
freely, and brown pink the same). He used a great deal
of terre verte, which he mixed with his blues, generally
with ultramarine. Latterly he used Cremona white ;
this he purchased of Scott in the Strand, who on re-
tiring from business gave me what remained. It \vas
the purest white I ever used, and accounts for the purity
of Gainsborough's carnations."
Of Mr. Trimmer's notes those about the Cremona
white are interesting, as the writer obtained his informa-
tion from Scott, who was perhap^the John Scott who was
in business in 1797 as a "water-colour preparer" at
417 Strand, and who appears to have been one of the
colourmen with whom Gainsborough dealt when he lived
in London. But the particulars about the palette cannot
be accepted unreservedly. Mr. Trimmer, who " thought "
he could remember them, had them from Briggs, who
must have obtained his infonnation from Margaret
Gainsborough, and it is not unlikely that some of the
colours may have been forgotten or varied when passed
on from one to another. It is known from Gains-
borough's correspondence with Jackson of Exeter that
he used indigo when at Bath— perhaps experimentally,
for every artist seems to have been an experimentalist
with pigments and mediums at that time. One of the
earlier Royal Academicians, Richard Yeo, used even to
manufacture colours on a small scale. Gainsborough,
who painted simply and directly, probably experimented
less than most, although he must have varied his palette
and method of painting occasionally. Field in his
Chromatography speaks of Gainsborough having at one
time painted his flesh with red and green alone, but does
not say whence he derived this information.
Asphaltum is believed to have been a favourite pig-
ment of Gainsborough's, and according to the writer of
an interesting article on colours and varnishes, published
LONDON, 1785 247
in the Art Union more than seventy years ago, he boasted
that with its help he could paint a pit " as deep as the
infernal regions." His fondness for this fascinating,
but in modern hands dangerous, pigment is emphasized
by the appearance in a list of artist's colours issued a
few years after his death, of " Gainsborough's Essence
of Asphaltum," which is quoted immediately after
" Vandyke's Brown."
We know as little about Gainsborough's tools and
methods of painting as we do of his pigments, but if his
daughter's memory may be trusted her father worked
with paint so thin and liquid that his palette ran over
unless he kept it on the level. It is generally agreed
that he used very long brushes, and " Nollekens " Smith
who saw him at work, says : " I was much surprised
to see him sometimes paint portraits with pencils on
sticks full six feet in length, and his method of using
them was this : he placed himself and his canvas at a
right angle with the sitter, so that he stood still and
touched the features of his picture exactly at the same
distance at which he viewed his sitter." The anony-
mous biographer of the Morning Chronicle, who knew
the painter, excuses his supposed want of finish by saying
that he worked with a very long and broad brush. An-
other contemporary, John Williams (Pasquin), in a bio-
graphical note declares that Gainsborough always prided
himself upon using longer and broader tools than other
men, and upon standing farther from his canvas when at
work. That he always stood to paint we know from
Thicknesse, but it is obvious that all his work could not
have been done with broad tools of hoghair. Probably
he used camel-hair brushes sometimes, as did Gains-
borough Dupont, who inherited his uncle's implements
and colours, and in painting followed his manner exactly.
Dupont left behind him, in addition to a great quantity
of hogtools, " twelve bundles of camel's hair pencils."
Fulcher says that when Gainsborough's sitters left
248 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
him it was his custom to close the shutter, in which was
a small circular aperture, the only access for light, and by
this subdued illumination work on his picture and get
rid of superfluous detail. No authority is given for this
statement, but there can be little doubt that Gains-
borough loved to subdue the light in his painting-room.
Williams says that it was sometimes subdued to such an
extent that objects were barely visible. "Yet," he adds,
in a contemptuous reference to Gainsborough's portraits,
" of what importance, after all, is any affectation of and
singularity of manner if that medium is not productive
of excellence. ... I think if his portraits involved the
perishable qualities imputable to those of Sir Joshua
Reynolds, that their fading into nothingness would not
be so injurious to his memory as their preservation.
His portraits of ladies are all over-vermillioned on the
cheeks, so as to look like varnished puppets." This
bitter and unjust criticism of Gainsborough was no
doubt inspired by the bad feeling that existed between
Williams and Bate. Williams, some years before
writing this criticism, had been connected with the
Morning Herald, but left that journal after a sudden
and violent quarrel with its editor, who, as he well
knew, had been Gainsborough's intimate friend and
most devoted admirer.
If we know little of Gainsborough's painting materials,
we know less of the sources from whence they were
obtained, and with the exception of Mr. Trimmer's
reference to " Scott of the Strand," I am not aware of
any mention of a colourman with whom Gainsborough
had dealings. Richard Wilson patronised Newman's,
a firm that is still flourishing, now of Soho Square, but
then of Gerrard Street. Gainsborough perhaps was also
among the painters who dealt there, but Messrs. New-
man's eighteenth-century ledgers and account-books
were destroyed when they moved to Soho Square in 1800,
and no record remains of their earher transactions. An-
LONDON, 1785 249
other colourman who enjoyed a large connection among
the artists of Gainsborough's time, and afterwards
suppHed Turner and Raeburn with some of their materials,
was Middleton of St. Martin's Lane.
Gainsborough amused himself in the autumn of
1785 by copying a picture, a task that he could accomplish
with extraordinary success if he were in sympathy with
the painter of the original. Sir Joshua himself admitted
that he had been obliged to examine for a long time a
copy by Gainsborough of a Vandyke before he could decide
if it were an imitation or an original. But, he said, it
was not often that there was any occasion for doubt, as
very few who could paint such originals as Gainsborough
ever employed their time in copying. The picture
copied in 1785 was a Velasquez, then known as The
Conspirators, which Lord Grantham had acquired some
years earlier in Madrid, when he was Ambassador to the
Spanish Court. Gainsborough's copy of this picture
was so faithful to the manner and spirit of Velasquez
that the Spanish Ambassador to England, who saw it
at Schomberg House, wished to buy it. However,
Gainsborough would not part with his copy, and it re-
mained in his possession until his death, when his wife
was unable to find a purchaser for it at the price she asked,
eighty guineas.
Lord Grantham's Velasquez, which is not an especi-
ally notable example of that master, is now the property
of Lord Lucas, and was lent by him to the exhibition
of Spanish Old Masters held in 191 3 at the Grafton
Galleries, where it was catalogued as A Conversation
of Spaniards, No. 66. The picture, rather more than
three feet in length, shows an archway in a ruined build-
ing, beneath which four men are grouped, talking together.
One of them wears a cloak of bright scarlet. At the
British Institution, to which it was lent in 1808, the
Velasquez was known as Four Men under a Gateway,
and described as " a picture said to have been particularly
250 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
a favourite with Gainsborough." Velasquez appears to
have been much admired by Gainsborough who, accord-
ing to Northcote, was anxious to purchase the portrait
of Don Balthasar on horseback, now at Duhvich, but could
not afford the sum demanded.
Three portraits of one of the judges, Baron Skinner,
were commenced by Gainsborough in October. In the
same month he was offered an interesting commission —
to paint a companion of his beautiful, but still unsold,
picture of The Mall. All the figures in it were to be
portraits, probably of Royalties, as the commission came
from Buckingham House ; and the landscape in the back-
ground was to represent " Richmond water-walk, or
Windsor." Of this picture, the idea of which was so
promising, I have found no further mention, and appar-
ently the commission was not executed.
In November, the child who sat earlier in the year
for the beautiful Cottage Girl with Dog and Pitcher, was
painted again as the principal figure in another pastoral
picture, the Cottage Children with the Ass, or, as it is some-
times called, Rustic Amusement. This picture, which
was finished before Christmas, we know now only by
the engraving, and Bate's description of it is therefore
worth quoting. He writes in the middle of December :
" Mr. Gainsborough's picture of the Peasant Girl and
Boy has received the last touches of that master. The
figures are brought pretty forward in the scene, and
explain the subject with great perspicuity. The girl
appears to have been sent from a distant cottage with
her little brother to gather firewood at the entrance to
a grove, but meeting with a young ass the girl seats her
brother on it. The boy seems pleased, yet terrified at
his situation, and the action of his right hand at the side
of his head adds force to the expression of his counte-
nance. They are painted in tattered drapery that well
accords with rustic penury, and on that account the
picture has greater value. The ass appears alive, and
the other materials, such as decayed trees, foliage, grass,
LONDON, 1785 251
&c., in the foreground are coloured with the utmost
force and spirit. The scene extends to the horizon of a
wild coimtry. A cottage, water, and other natural
objects are disposed in the landscape, and the prospect
is terminated by remote hills. A beautiful sky, varie-
gated with light and tender clouds, completes the harmony
of this admirable piece."
To the subsequent history of the Cottage Children with
the Ass, and to its unfortunate destruction, I shall refer in
another chapter.
In one of Bate's notes on this picture he says that
the little boy and girl showm in it were the tenants of a
cottage near Richmond, " where ]\Ir. Gainsborough has
a house." The locality in which Gainsborough spent
his summers, and his days of recreation generally in his
London period, was Hampstead, according to Cunning-
ham ; and Sir Walter Armstrong states that he had a
house on Kew Green. For Cunningham's statement I
can find no sufficient authority ; and that of Sir Walter
Armstrong is apparently based on the facts that Gains-
borough dated a letter from Kew Green, and that he was
buried in Kew Churchyard. " Presumably," says Sir
Walter, " he would not have been buried in Kew Church-
yard had he not possessed some sort of domicile in the
parish." Gainsborough's interment at Kew was, of
course, due to the fact that he wished to lie beside
Kirby ; and the letter to Mr. Pearce headed " Kew Green,
Sunday morning — Church Time," in which he announces
his intention of visiting the Lakes, was probably written
at the house of his sister. Lysons, whose Environs of
London was published soon after Gainsborough's death,
in dealing with Kew and its churchyard describes the
painter's tomb, and adds : " Mr. Gainsborough never
resided at Kew except on occasional visits to his sister."
Gainsborough's country house was, as Bate says, at
Richmond, and situated, oddly enough, close to that
of Sir Joshua Reynolds. I do not know how long
252 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
Gainsborough lived at Richmond, but certainly for
some years, as the house was still in his possession at
the time of his death. He mentions it in his will, and
bequeaths its contents to his wife. George the Third,
who frequently resided at Kew, used to call and see
Gainsborough at his Richmond house, where the artist
had a picture by Vandevelde, which was admired by his
Majesty. The Vandevelde was among the pictures
offered for sale at Schomberg House the year after Gains-
borough's death, and some surprise was then expressed
that no effort was made to secure it for the Royal
collection.
CHAPTER XIV
LONDON, 1786
The wreck of the Halswelle — Exhibition at Gainsborough's gallery —
A group of landscapes— Two portraits of the Prince of Wales —
He buys a second landscape — List of portraits exhibited — The
Morning Walk and Theophile Gautier — Gainsborough and the
Academy — Comments of the newspapers — Bate's rejoinder —
Sir Joshua and the Girl with Pigs — Hayley on Gainsborough —
He commences the Market Cart — The Girl with Milk— PoTtraits
of the Duke of Norfolk, Mrs. Sheridan, Lady Basset, and Mrs,
Franco — Lord Archibald Hamilton and his brother — A signed
portrait — " Mr. Coke of Norfolk in his Shooting Habit " — Gains-
borough at Holkham.
Another visit to Bath was made by Gainsborough in
January 1786, and in February he completed a second
full-length of Lord Mulgrave, which was described as
possessing in likeness and spirit all the recommendations
of the first portrait. There was some gossip at this time
about a portrait of the Prince of Wales, which the Duke
of Orleans intended to have painted for his new gallery
at the Palais Royal. It was suggested that Gainsborough
should be the artist, and that the Prince should wear for
this portrait a costume of the period of Edward the
Fourth, with the pendant George at his breast, and his
head adorned with the crest of the Principality. How-
ever, nothing appears to have come of this suggestion,
or of the idea of painting a picture of the wreck of the
Halswelle, which Gainsborough entertained in the early
months of the year.
The tragic story of the loss of the great East
Indiaman on the 6th of January 1786 caused a sensation
in England something akin to that occasioned by the
sinking of the Titanic in our own time. The Halswelle,
outward bound, was wrecked on the Dorsetshire coast,
253
254 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
near St. Alban's Head. Nearly four hundred of her
crew and passengers were drowned, including her com-
mander, Captain Pierce, and his two daughters, whom
he was taking to India upon what he intended should
be his last voyage. Pierce was a man of cultivation.
One of the chroniclers of the wreck says that the com-
mander of the Halswelle " had a great taste for the
polite arts, and was the means of making the fortune of
Mr. Zoffany the painter by taking him to India and re-
commending him there. In this fatal voyage he took a
son of Mr. Miller, the organist of Doncaster, to superin-
tend his band of music and to accompany his daughters
at their pianoforte. But neither Mr. Miller's son nor
one of the band of musicians escaped the fury of the
devouring waves." The influence of Zoffany and other
European painters who visited India appears to have
encouraged a taste for the fine arts among the settlers
from the West, for it is remarked that the cargo of the
Halswelle included a large assortment of boxes of colours,
crayons, black-lead pencils, and a variety of other articles
for drawing and painting, shipped by Messrs. Reeves &
Son, of Holbom Bridge. Gainsborough and Opie are
both described, soon after the news of the wreck reached
London, as meditating its illustration upon canvas.
" We laud the spirit of emulation," says a writer in com-
menting on this announcement, " and hope it will pro-
duce a degree of excellence in both at which neither may
repine." I can find no record of any picture of the kind
by Gainsborough or Opie, but the wreck inspired the
brush of another artist, James Northcote, R.A., who
exhibited The Loss of the Halswelle East Indiaman in the
Academy of 1786.
Gainsborough's idea of illustrating the tragedy of the
6th of January was probably a momentary impulse, soon
forgotten in the joy of landscape painting, at which he
was working hard in February and March. At the end
of the last-named month it is announced that Gains-
LONDON, 1786 255
borough has been dedicating his skill to scenes of
wild nature, and that seven landscapes — of the most
channing subjects — have been completed. They are all
small, and four of them almost minute, and finished with
what is spoken of as extraordinary neatness. Cattle,
sheep, lonely shepherds, herdsmen, broken ground, sedgy
water and romantic trees, appear in them in beautiful
disposition. A week or two later this group of " seven
imaginary views " forms one of the features of the newly
arranged exhibition in the gallery at Schomberg House,
which challenged that of the Royal Academy with a
collection of pictures, old and new, from Gainsborough's
hand. Bate gives lengthy notices of the exhibition,
commencing with the landscapes.
" Although," he says, " the excellency of Mr. Gains-
borough's portraits, and their subjects, are of the first
attraction, yet as his late-finished landscapes are the
general topic among the devotees to the polite arts we
must commence with them and defer to a future number
our account of the Portrait Gallery."
I quote his careful descriptions of the landscapes in
the hope that they may lead to the identification of
some of Gainsborough's smaller works which it has
hitherto been almost impossible to assign to a definite
period.
" The largest of these landscapes displays a romantic
scene. Broken ground, water, sloping trees, and an ex-
tended upland. In the foreground, near a cottage,
three horses are seen with pack-saddles on them ; one
is laid down to rest, and the whole seem as if weary.
The driver appears near at hand, and some cottagers
complete the number of figures. The sky of this piece
is painted with the most exquisite touches, and the
clouds marked with uncommon brightness and serenity."
This may perhaps be the small picture shown at
Messrs, Agnews' Gallery in the autimm of 1902, and
described in their catalogue as A Woody Landscape with
Pack-horses resting by a Cottage.
256 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
" The next picture in point of dimensions," continues
Bate, " is a representation of a woody country, the face
of which is covered with variety ; distant thickets,
jutting headlands, trees rich with foHage of the most
spirited pencilhng, and here and there diversified with
the yellow of autumn. On a sunny bank, kept at a
proper distance, sheep are browsing ; a cottage is seen
near, and in the foreground a herdsman is driving cattle
to a sedgy watering place. The light and shade of this
picture diffuse a fine effect upon the scene, and the sky,
rich with fervid clouds, adds to the beauty of the land-
scape.
" A small landscape in a black frame demands parti-
cular attention on account of a sky possessed of a clear-
ness and transparency that approaches nature to the
most perfect point of imitation ; and the little expanse
to the horizon, of a rugged surface, broken steep, withered
trees, a shepherd and dog with sheep, and a variety of
objects besides, entice the eye to dwell on the faithful
scene.
" The picture next to be noticed is a landscape which
is in a trifling degree in the style of Ruysdael ; we mean
more in respect to the air of colouring than the manner.
The trees are in full leaf, but yet the sky is tinted so as
to give an impression of wintry cold. Some cattle and
a peasant are in the foreground, with other minute
figures. Two subjects of a lesser size are excellent com-
panions. One of them discovers a shepherd playing with
his dog, his sheep lie in scattered parcels. A cow is
grazing on a rising bank. Trees in verdure, and decayed
trunks, water and other images fill up the perspective.
The companion represents cows on a common, a sedgy
brook, and trees and hills in the distance. The seventh
view consists of a rising ground with a country cart, team,
and other rural representations."
These notes on Gainsborough's newly painted land-
scapes were soon followed by others on the portraits in
his gallery. Two unfinished portraits of the Prince of
Wales first attract the wTiter's attention. He regrets
that Gainsborough has so far been able to obtain only
one sitting for each of them, and declares that in their
present condition they seem to reprove the Prince for his
LONDON, 1786 257
absence from the studio. One of these was the before-
mentioned portrait commissioned by Mr. Thomas Coke
of Norfolk, showing the Prince in armour. The other,
painted for "a distinguished character in pubhc Hfe,"
was apparently at this time not sketched beyond the
head, as it is stated that Gainsborough intended to
make the costume a gala dress. The full-length of Lady
Sheffield, commenced in 1785, was now seen in its finished
state and met with general approbation ; but the full-
length of Mrs. Sheridan seated in a wood, begun at the
same time, was as yet without some of the details that
now figure in the background of the picture. At this
exhibition, too, the National Gallery portrait of Mrs.
Siddons was shown publicly for the first time, together
with another portrait of Mrs. Watson, which is praised
for its spirit and likeness ; and a three-quarter length of
Mrs. Fane, " a very animated portrait, and the habit of
Ruben's wife in which she is painted is a well chosen
dress." Gainsborough, it will be remembered, had
already exhibited a portrait of a Mrs. Fane at the
Academy of 1782.
Portraits of men shown at Gainsborough's house on
this occasion included two full-lengths of distinguished
persons in their official robes. One of them, painted a
year earlier, represented the Speaker, Sir Wolfran Corn-
wall ; the other. Lord Frederick Campbell, Lord Clerk
Register of Scotland, son of the famous beauty, Mary
Bellenden, and brother to the fourth Duke of Argyll.
Lord Harrington, in regimentals, figured on another
canvas, and the exhibition also contained the portraits
of Lord Rodney and his fellow-seaman. Admiral Graves,
two half-lengths of Baron Skinner, and whole-lengths of
Mr. Beaufoy and Captain Berkeley. The portrait of
Captain Berkeley, showing him standing on the shore
and signalling to a boat, was the one shown at Gains-
borough's first private exhibition in 1784. It still re-
mained in the gallery, and with it the group of the Three
R
258 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
Eldest Princesses, which had also been shown at Gains-
borough's house in 1784, after its removal from the
Academy. Bate announces in his review of the present
exhibition that the picture of the Princesses will remain
in the charge of Mr. Gainsborough until the completion
of the Saloon at Carlton House, in which the Prince of
Wales intended to hang the portraits of all his numerous
brothers and sisters. He supplements this announce-
ment a few days later by stating that the King has
given the Prince a number of fine pictures for the adorn-
ment of Carlton House, and among them the most recent
paintings of their Majesties and the royal children by
Gainsborough.
It is unfortunate that one of the most famous pic-
tures of this period, the portraits of young Mr. and Mrs.
Hallet, painted full-length on one canvas, and now kno\^^l
as The Morning Walk, was not sho\vn at the 1786 ex-
hibition. We gather from a note by Bate that it was
painted in the autumn of 1785, and that it was on view
for a time in Gainsborough's studio. But he says very
little about it, although, as he was once curate at Hendon,
he was probably acquainted with some of the Hallet
family, whose estate of Canons was in that neighbourhood.
It was this superb portrait that fascinated Theophile
Gautier, who said he felt when he saw it " a strange
retrospective sensation, so intense is the illusion it pro-
duces of the spirit of the eighteenth century. We really
fancy we see the young couple walking arm in arm along
a garden avenue." Lord Rothschild is the fortunate
possessor of the painting which so greatly charmed the
appreciative French critic.
The Prince of Wales, who already owned an impor-
tant landscape by Gainsborough, purchased a second
example of his work in the spring of 1786. This was the
picture of a country waggon returning from market in
the evening, mentioned in the last chapter as painted in
the winter of 1784-5. It was bought by the Prince to
LONDON, 1786 259
hang as a companion to the landscape described in the
account of the first exhibition at Schomberg House. Both
remained in Gainsborough's charge until his death in
1788, and, by the Prince's permission, were shown with
the other pictures by the artist at the exhibition and
sale of 1789. In 1841 the two landscapes were offered
for sale at Christie's and bought in as the reserve was
not reached. Christie's advertisement throws some light
on their history after they were removed from Gains-
borough's house. " Two magnificent works of Gains-
borough, the property of a man of fashion. By Messrs.
Christie & Manson at their Great Room, King Street,
St. James's, Saturday, March 27. A pair of landscapes
by Gainsborough in his very finest time and manner,
which were painted for the Prince of Wales by whom
they were presented to Mrs. Fitzherbert. The one re-
presents a market-cart with figures, descending a hill in
a richly wooded landscape ; the companion a grand
romantic landscape with a shepherd keeping sheep in a
valley surrounded by bold mountainous scenery. These
superb works are in the finest state." The " man of
fashion " by whom they were offered for sale was Colonel
Dawson-Damer.
Returning to 1786, Lord Surrey's portrait was still
in hand in April, although commenced nearly two years
earlier. This was the full-length shown, with only the
head finished, at Schomberg House in July 1784, when
it was stated that the sitter was to be painted in a dress
of the seventeenth century. The dress, of the Vandyke
fashion, was now well advanced, but the portrait in its
complete state was not exhibited until after Lord Surrey
succeeded his father as Duke of Norfolk. Another sitter
of April was Lady Impey, whose portrait is mentioned
as descriptive of her unaffected manner and natural
character.
As in the preceding spring of 1785 the newspapers
were now discussing the quarrels of the artists, and the
26o THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
prospect of the reappearance at Somerset House of those
who had disagreed with the Academy. The outlook was
not hopeful. " The disputes between the gentlemen of
the brush," says the Morning Post, " are not yet accommo-
dated. Consequently the public will continue to miss
Gainsborough, Romney, &c., who content themselves
with the private approbation of their visitors." Another
paper expresses the hope that Gainsborough will not
through an ill-judged pride deprive the public of a view
of his beautiful landscape and the new portrait of Mrs.
Sheridan ; and the Public Advertiser, referring to the
recently painted picture of the children with the donkey,
says, " Gainsborough's Ass is an Ass indeed if it stays
out of the Exhibition. It would be loaded with popu-
larity, more if possible, and more deservedly, than the
Pigs and Milk, or the Boys and Dogs."
However, Gainsborough sent nothing to Somerset
House, and at the end of April, when the galleries had
opened their doors, the Morning Chronicle, graver and
more sedate than its contemporaries, ventures to chide
him among others :
" That the present exhibition is a very good one,
we see and we feel," says the Chronicle, " but we see
and feel so strongly for the risk it ran of being otherwise
that we think too much reprehension cannot be pointed
against the causes which might have made it otherwise.
The perverse sequestration of Gainsborough, of Wright
of Derby, of Meyer, of Dance, and perhaps some other,
is to be deemed a desertion of duty. It is an object
provoking popular displeasure. And from this time
forth there should subsist among the laws of the Academy
some other order compulsive of individual effort in all
instances contributing to the general stock. That each
artist should exhibit or should fine."
But Bate, who had been silent in the controversy on
the same subject which had raged in the spring of the
preceding year, now spoke with evident authority in the
Morning Herald, and while snubbing the commentators
LONDON, 1786 261
on the Academy quarrel, showed how Gainsborough still
resented the treatment of the group of the Three Eldest
Princesses two years before. He writes :
" Much has been said in the public prints in reproof
of Mr. Gainsborough's continuing to withhold his works
from the Academy. We cannot, however, but consider
such remarks as unmeaning and impertinent, because
those who are too much in the dark to judge of the
affront offered to the celebrated artist and the feelings
that were thereby excited are ill qualified to decide upon
the propriety of his conduct. We, however, regret with
all possible concern the absence of his admirable and
various performances ; his portraits whose imitation
assumes the energy of life, his landscapes where Nature
appears as in a mirror ; and those Httle, simple subjects
where, in a peasant, a woodman, a shepherd boy or
cottage girl, a story was told that awakened in the heart
the most pathetic sensations and equally evinced the
truth, science and genius of the admirable master."
The bitterness of this note is emphasized by others
that appeared in the Herald, and indicated increasing ill-
feeling towards the President, who only four years before
had bought Gainsborough's Girl with Pigs from the ex-
hibition of the Royal Academy, and written its painter
a letter with " half-a-hundred graceful comphments."
" Why," asks Bate querulously, " does Sir Joshua hang
Mr. Gainsborough's little picture of the pigs in his
cabinet collection of all the great masters of past times ?
Does Sir Joshua really intend this as a compliment to
his contemporary, or is it to afford room for invidious
comparison ? Let Sir Joshua mean as he will, the merits
of the painting cannot be destroyed."
Reynolds, who had in 1784 been exonerated by Bate
from all comphcity in the refusal to place the Three
Eldest Princesses at the desired elevation, was now him-
self a sufferer at the hands of the Committee of Arrange-
ment of the Academy Exhibition. The Morning Post,
in its notice of the Academy of 1786, praises Sir Joshua's
262 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
Portrait of a Young Gentleman (lo), and then proceeds
to upbraid the hangers for the disgraceful position they
have assigned to it. " Shame on you, ye Jack Ketches
appointed for hanging the pictures ! — for removing this
gem of the first water to a height that renders it almost
invisible, and placing your own daubings in the most
advantageous situations." But despite the bad hanging
of the Portrait of a Young Gentleman, Sir Joshua shone
with more than ordinary lustre at the Academy. Among
his thirteen canvases were the well-known portrait of the
Duchess of Devonshire and her infr.nt daughter, and
those of Joshua Sharpe and of John Hunter the great
surgeon. Another notable canvas shown this year by
the President was a full-length portrait of the Duke of
Orleans, who was in England at the time of the Academy
dinner, and attended it in company with the Prince of
Wales and a host of notabilities, English and foreign. At
the dinner, which was more than usually magnificent,
the Duke sat beneath his own portrait.
In May Gainsborough was once more painting pigs,
but we are not told whether he allowed them to run
about on the studio floor as he did when he was at work
on the picture bought by Sir Joshua. The description
suggests rather that the animals in the second picture
were painted from the studies made for the first one.
" Mr. Gainsborough is at this time engaged upon a
beautiful landscape in the foreground of which the trio
of pigs that are so highly celebrated by the connoisseurs
are introduced, together with the little girl and several
other rustic hgures." The picture was bought a few
weeks later by Mr. Tollemache, who was also the owner
of Gainsborough's Two Shepherd Boys with Dogs Fighting,
exhibited at the Academy of 1783.
The summer of 1786 was a period of hard work for
the artist, who in the autumn was congratulated upon
the result of his labours. The editor of the Morning
Herald quotes Hayley's lines :
LONDON, 1786 263
" Art with no common gifts her Gainsbro' graced
Two different pencils in his hand she placed ;
This shall command, she said, with certain aim,
The perfect semblance of the human frame
This, lightly sporting on the velvet green
Paint the wild beauties of the mimic scene."
He adds that, in illustration of what the poet advances,
Gainsborough has completed most of the portraits now
in his gallery with the happiest success, and given
some beautiful representations of rustic nature with his
pecuhar excellence. One of these rustic pictures, de-
scribed in October as just finished, is a study of a peasant
child returning to a cottage with a pan of milk. A cow
and a woman milking are seen in the distance, and " a
landscape full of beautiful variety is finely tempered
with a well-tinted sky."
But a far more important pastoral picture was
finished in the autunm of 1786. This was the famous
work, The Market Cart, now in the National Gallery,
and the best known of all Gainsborough's landscapes.
The date of The Market Cart has always been a matter
of conjecture, and the compilers of the National Gallery
catalogue have not ventured to assign it to any period,
although they attach speculative dates to other canvases
by Gainsborough. The first mention of it in 1786 is not
by Bate, but by a rival journahst who, after writing about
the pictures he had seen at Schomberg House, apologises
for not having mentioned first " this fine work ; a large
upright landscape ; a cart upon unequal ground with
cabbages, carrots and turnips, and figures in and out of
the cart, the whole in Gainsborough's best style." A
description, written a little later in the Morning Herald,
is far fuller and better than the foregoing, and identifies
the picture beyond all possible doubt :
" In departing from the portraits (at Schomberg
House) the eye cannot dwell too long on a beautiful
landscape that Mr. Gainsborough has hnished within
these few days. It is a representation of a wood, through
264 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
which a road appears. A loaded market cart with two
girls seated on the top is passing along, and beside the
road some weary travellers are resting. The foliage of
the trees is in a rich variation of hues, expressive of
autumn — here the trees are verdant, a browner aspect
there prevails — and all the varied greens and yellows of
the season temper the scene and exhibit a pleasing
harmony. The interior recesses of the wood afford
charming invitations to the eye. The distances are ex-
quisitely soft, and some broken clouds, diffused over
the trees and through the branches, give a delightful
aspect to the whole."
To the further history of this important picture I
shall refer in the succeeding chapter.
The portraits and other pictures shown at Gains-
borough's gallery towards the end of 1786 are mentioned
in several journals, one of which speaks of the new pic-
ture of the child with the pan of milk as " a good, small
whole-length of the same girl whom Gainsborough put
into a yet better picture with an ass." Bate, however,
describes the picture as one of a little peasant boy carry-
ing a pan of milk to a neighbouring cottage from an ad-
joining field ; and later, when it was shown at Macklin's
Gallery as Lavinia, he made some amusing comments on
the misappropriateness of its title. If, as I imagine, the
painting of the child with a pan of milk is the one that
was afterwards in the possession of Samuel Rogers, it
has generally been described as representing a girl.
Rogers lent it to the exhibition of Gainsborough's work
held at the British Institution in 1814, and it appears in
the catalogue as Girl with Milk. With the same title
and a description that exactly corresponds with the one
given by Bate, the pictures figure in Fulcher's list of
Gainsborough's pictures accompanied by an interesting
anecdote told to Fulcher by Sir George Phillips, who at
that time (1856) owned the so-called Girl with Milk.
"The picture," said Sir George, "was bought by my
father about forty years ago from his friend, the late
MRS. SHERIDAN
By permission of Lord Rothschild
LONDON, 1786 265
Mr. Rogers, for a hundred and seventy guineas, the price
Mr. Rogers had paid for it. The reason he was ready
to part ^\ith one of Gainsborough's most beautiful works
was a remark of Benjamin West's that ' the girl's hair
was heavily painted.' I do not think that West's brother
artists would have joined in this criticism." Fulcher, it
may be remarked, describes as Girls with a Donkey the
picture of the Cottage Children with the Ass, the figures
in which were certainly intended by Gainsborough to
represent a girl and her younger brother.
Among the portraits in Gainsborough's autumn ex-
hibition was one of the Duke of Norfolk, commenced, as
I have already explained, when that nobleman was Lord
Surrey. More than two years in hand, it was now at
length completed, and this full-length of the Duke in a
Vandyke habit is described as a fine portrait of his
Grace, although it is suggested that its effect would
have been better had the draperies been crimson instead
of black. Gainsborough, as we know, thought that
fancy dress was apt to deprive a portrait of some of its
qualities of likeness, and this appears to have been the
case with the Duke of Norfolk. A journalist who went
to see the pictures at Schomberg House says in a note
on the subject, " The Duke of Norfolk has chosen to be
painted in the Vandyke dress, and so, though the picture
is very like, it is not perceived to be so," a remark, it is
safe to say, that Gainsborough himself must have in-
spired when he was showing the portrait to the visitor.
The portrait of ]\Irs. Sheridan, seated beneath a tree,
reappeared once more at this exhibition, but still lacked
the final touches in the shape of the lambs, which the
artist, according to Bate, was then about to add, to give
the picture " an air more pastoral than it at present
possesses." A half-length of Lady Basset (afterwards
Lady de Dunstanville) is probably the portrait sho\\Ti
at the Winter Exhibition of the Royal Academy in 1876,
and at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1885. The portrait of
266 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
this lady, who was the wife of the purchaser of the Cottage
Girl with Dog and Pitcher, is mentioned as " delicately
touched ; the most exquisite softness pervades the whole.
The hands are finished with the beauty of Vandyke."
A further note on the same portrait again suggests the
inspiration of Gainsborough, and recalls the trouble
about the Three Eldest Princesses. " This picture, from
the tenderness of the colouring should not be hung at a
great elevation ; its effect else will be diminished."
Of the full-length of " the bewitching Mrs. Franco,
whose inviting lip and animated eye retain the expression
and fire of nature," it is said that the Juno air of the
sitter is admirably hit off and the drapery full of easy
negligence. A half-length of Mrs. Hibbert was perhaps
the portrait lent to the Royal Academy in 1885. A por-
trait of Lord Rodney, painted for Alderman Harley (it is
not clear whether this is the canvas painted a year or
two earlier) is declared by one of the critics — a devotee
of Gilbert Stuart — to be far inferior to a study of the
Admiral by the American artist. The same writer
thinks that the portrait of Lord Camden, which is also
in the exhibition, is the best that Gainsborough ever
painted ; but that its supremacy may be challenged by
the portrait of Justice Willes, hanging on the same wall
but at present unfinished. Of the remaining portraits
in the gallery three call for special remark.
Gainsborough, always fond of the costume of his
beloved Vandyke, even though it cost his portraits some
of the likeness upon which he prided himself, had recently
painted in this dress one of the two sons of Lord Archibald
Hamilton, who a few years afterwards succeeded to the
Dukedom of Hamilton. In his notice of this exhibition
of Gainsborough's gallery, Bate says : " Two of the sons
of Lord Archibald Hamilton are charming portraits. The
elder brother is in a Vandyke habit and his hair in a style
to comport with the drapery. The other is in a more
modern dress." These portraits are no doubt the two
LONDON, 1786 267
ovals lent by the late Sir William Agnew in 1891 to the
Old Masters exhibition at the Royal Academy. The cata-
logue of that exhibition states that the boy in the Vandyke
dress is the younger brother Archibald ; but, as we see.
Bate, when writing about the pictures of 1786, says that
the elder boy Alexander is thus attired. Bate, and
Gainsborough from whom he obtained his information,
may have fallen into error in this matter on account of
the younger brother instead of the elder bearing the
Christian name of his father. The portrait of the brother,
whichever it is, with the Vandyke dress and long hair,
is now in the collection of Miss Ahce de Rothschild. It
is one of the comparatively few signed works by Gains-
borough.
The last work to be noticed in this remarkable ex-
hibition is the full-length of Mr. Thomas Coke of Norfolk,
the great landowner and earnest politician who com-
missioned Gainsborough to paint the portrait of the
Prince of Wales to which reference has been made. The
portrait of the Prince was still awaiting the additional
sittings for which the artist begged in vain, but that of
Mr. Coke was completed in the autumn of the year (1786)
now under review. It was a work calculated to appeal
particularly to a lover of sport like Bate, who says of it :
" The portrait of Mr. Coke of Norfolk, in his shooting
habit, is one of the happiest efforts in that line of painting
we have for some time witnessed. The colouring and
pencilHng is in Mr. Gainsborough's best manner. The
dogs, which are in the language of sportsmen watching
charge, are charmingly composed. The action of two of
them is particularly striking : — ^the one is viewing a dead
woodcock that lies at his master's foot, and the other
looking up to Mr. Coke while he is loading his piece."
This whole length, now at Holkham, remained for
many months in the artist's studio, from whence it was
despatched in the summer of 1787. " Mr. Gainsborough's
charming portrait of Mr. Coke, with his spaniels panting
round him, is sent off to the seat of his sister, for whom
268 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
it was painted." The original of the portrait, known
everywhere in England for half a century or more as
" Mr. Coke of Norfolk," was created Earl of Leicester in
the year 1837, and the present Lord Leicester is his
grandson. Mr. Coke appears to have been on the most
friendly terms with Gainsborough, who once stayed at
Holkham, and it is believed painted there the portrait
of himself that still hangs in the Hall. But no trust-
worthy evidence is known to exist concerning Gains-
borough's visit to Holkham or what he did there. One
of Thomas Coke's biographers states that his daughters,
Jane and Ann, were pupils of Gainsborough, who stayed
at Holkham to teach them, and did so with such success
that some of their work can hardly be distinguished
from his ov^m. This must be a mistake. Mr. Coke's
eldest daughter, Jane, was not born until 1777, and
Gainsborough, if he gave her any instruction, could not
have done so after she was much more than ten years
old, as he died in 1788.
CHAPTER XV
LONDON, 1787
The Shakespeare Gallery — Gainsborough unrepresented — The reason —
" Three pictures for three thousand guineas " — The Market Cart —
Gainsborough paints Lady Clive and Lady Hopetoun — Pitt sits
at Schomberg House — Lord Lansdowne — Sale of the Cottage
Children with the Ass — Sir Peter Burrell buys The Market Cart —
The luck of the Burrells — Gainsborough's prices for portraits —
He buys a Murillo — A famous trial — Gainsborough's evidence —
"The painter's eye" — Gainsborough in Flanders — Death of
Abel — The Marsham Family — Mr. Knapp — De Loutherbourg —
Bate's country house — His wife painted by Gainsborough — The
Duke of York — The Wood Gatherers — Jack Hill — Mrs. Welbore
Ellis — Mrs. Pujet — Gainsborough exhibits at Liverpool — Improved
relations with the Royal Academy.
When Alderman Boydell set on foot his famous scheme
for the foundation of a Shakespeare Gallery he offered
commissions to most of the prominent English figure
painters who were practising in 1786. The scheme pro-
mised well, for the alderman was a liberal paymaster, and
Sir Joshua Reynolds, Romney, West, Wright of Derby,
Barry, Fuseli, Smirke, Northcote, Westall, and Hamilton
were among those who responded to his invitation.
Gainsborough, for some reason that has until now remained
a mystery, was not represented in the Shakespeare
Gallery, but the cause of his absence is made clear by
some paragraphs which appeared in the World and the
Morning Herald in January, 1787. Writing in the last-
mentioned journal. Bate says :
" When Mr. Gainsborough was applied to by Mr.
Alderman Boydell to paint a scene for the much vaunted
edition of Shakespeare, he demanded a thousand pounds.
A subject in which ten or twelve figures are introduced
— painted with that adherence to Nature which has ever
269
270 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
distinguished the pencil of Mr. Gainsborough — cannot be
too highly rewarded."
The critic of the World, to whose admiration for the
portraits of Stuart I have recently alluded, was also a
passionate admirer of Romney, and Romney — a personal
friend of Boydell — was one of the earliest supporters of
the scheme for the foundation of the Shakespeare Gallery.
Two or three days after the appearance of the paragraph
in the Herald an article was published in the World, in
which the writer, after noticing the enthusiasm of the
artists and mentioning the intended contributions of Sir
Joshua to the Gallery, goes on to say :
" Mr. Romney, of whom against the world (that is
not our World and but a very small part indeed of any
other) we profess ourselves the defender — Mr. Romney
begins with the banquet scene of Macbeth. Mr. Gains-
borough does not paint, and though his place may easily
be supplied, we are sorry his name is not to be on this
great record of fame. We are not insensible to his merit,
and he would have made a very amusing picture from
the Two Gentlemen of Verona — of Launce and his dog.
But it could not be, for his proposal was thus impos-
sible : — To paint three pictures for three thousand
guineas. And not till the expiration of three years ! "
Bate, who never overlooked any expression derogatory
to Gainsborough, answered the World critic on the follow-
ing morning :
" A paper of yesterday in a most un-palette-sible
criticism upon painters, extols Romney, and observes
that Gainsborough, who is the most faithful disciple of
Nature that ever painted, may easily have his place
supplied ! Should the liberal artist in question see the
contemptible insinuation he will smile, we know, but
he might justly exclaim, ' Why ignorance itself is a
plummet o'er me ! ' "
Here the matter dropped, but there was to be more
trouble with the World a few months later.
Another note on The Market Cart mentions as an
LONDON, 1787 271
object of special interest the figure of the woodman with
a faggot, which Gainsborough had added to the picture
since the pubhcation of the first description. This note
was pubhshed in January, when a portrait of Lady Clive
was in hand and the beauty of the finished head is
extolled. " The eye, the lip, have the sensibility of hfe.
But this is to be a full-length ; proceed, good artist, we
beseech you, and give to the limbs their symmetry and
grace." Lady Hopetoun is another sitter of the same
period, and in this case Gainsborough's friendly critic
hopes much from the combination of the subject and
the artist, where Nature on the one hand and genius
on the other have been profusely liberal. But Lady
Hopetoun had at this time been a wife for twenty years,
and had lost some of her youthful freshness, as Bate does
not fail to recognise, though in the politest fashion.
"Her Ladyship," he says, "though not in the bloom
of life, possesses that elegance, grace, and beauty which
form the best combination a picture can have."
But ladies, whether fair or faded, did not engross
Gainsborough's brush in the opening months of 1787.
Pitt was attending his studio at Schomberg House for a
portrait intended for Mr. Grenville, and described as an
extraordinary likeness, and impressed with all the anxiety
and importance of public concern. A second sitter of
distinction was the recently created Marquis of Lans-
downe — better know at this time by his old title of Lord
Shelbume, of whom Walpole declared that " his false-
hood was so constant and notorious that it was rather
his profession than his instrument." Mrs. Piozzi, who
had no love for this statesman, tells an anecdote about
him and Gainsborough in her interesting Letters and
Literary Remains. " A man," she said, " remarkable for
duplicity, will always be suspected whether deserving
suspicion or no. Gainsborough drew Lord Shelburne's
portrait ; my Lord complained it was not like. The
painter said he did not approve it, and begged to try
272 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
again. Failing this time, however, he flung away his
pencil, saying ' D — n it, 1 never could see through varnish,'
and there's an end ! "
Mrs. Piozzi was mistaken in supposing that Lord
Lansdowne's portrait was left unfinished by Gainsborough,
who was well acquainted with the equivocating peer,
and had been his guest at Bo wood. Gainsborough may
not have had much sympathy with Lord Lansdowne
(who was an intimate friend of Sir Joshua Reynolds),
but his portrait, painted in April, 1787, was certainly
completed, and was the subject of flattering contemporary
notice. Supposed to be intended for a present for the
King of France, it was described in the following terms :
" The art cannot go beyond this effort. There is magic
in the picture and it appears to breathe. The portrait
is destined for France, and we may add that the honour
of England in the Fine Arts will be extended wherever it
goes." However Bate, while praising the picture, had
nothing good to say about the original, to whom in
politics he was opposed, and he accompanied his notes
on Lord Lansdowne's portrait with some verses that
must have been instantly challenged if they had been
applied to a modem statesman :
EPIGRAMMATIC
" When Mighty Louis lately sighed for peace
Unnumbered />ic/ures of himself sent o'er
More bright and luring than the Golden Fleece
Strong likenesses which Ministers adore.
These, decking Bowood out in lovely dress,
Might well a L . nsd . . n's heart with transport burn,
And Decency point out — he could no less
Than send one choice, rich picture in return.
' Come hither, Gainsbro',' says the Peer of Smiles,
Himself a dealer deep in oil and varnish,
' Quick, paint my head with all its courtly wiles,
For Gallia's King in colours naught can tarnish ! '
Gainsbro' by art unknown to Ancient Greece,
And subtle strokes no Roman brush could measure.
With bold, deep tints soon stamped ?i.sini;le piece
Which taste in every clime must own a TREASURE."
THE MARKET CART
National Gallery
LONDON, 1787 273
Lord Lansdowne's portrait and that of his son, Lord
Wycombe, were exhibited at Gainsborough's gallery
together with a number of other paintings in the first
week of May. The picture of the Cottage Children with
the Ass was there, but only for a short time, as it was
soon to be despatched to Exton, the seat of the Earl of
Gainsborough, who had bought it for three hundred
guineas. Another picture that was soon to leave the
gallery was The Market Cart, which had just been sold
for three hundred and fifty guineas to a generous patron
of Gainsborough, Sir Peter Burrell.
Sir Peter belonged to a family whose extraordinary
good fortune caused "the luck of the Burrells " to become
proverbial in the latter part of the eighteenth century.
The son of a man of small estate but good family, Peter
Burrell's engaging manners and graceful person early
captivated the heart of the Duke of Ancaster's eldest
daughter, whom he married in 1779. Soon after the
marriage the Duke and his only son died, and Burrell's
wife succeeded to much of the vast Ancaster estates and
to the Barony of Willoughby de Eresby. She also in-
herited jointly with her sister the post of Great Chamber-
lain of England, the duties of which were for many years
executed by her fortunate husband, who in the year that
he bought The Market Cart succeeded to a baronetcy
through the death of his great-uncle. The luck of the
Burrells was shared by most of the women of the family.
Sir Peter had four sisters, all poor and only one — the
eldest — a beauty. She married a commoner, but the
plain sisters — " never were women less endowed with
uncommon attractions of external form" — became the
brides respectively of the Duke of Northumberland, the
Duke of Hamilton, and the Earl of Beverley.
The Market Cart remained in the possession of Sir
Peter Burrell (afterwards created Lord Gwydyr) until
his death, when his heir sent it to Christie's, together with
Sir Joshua's Holy Family. Fulcher says that The Market
Cart was bought on this occasion by Segueir on behalf
S
274 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
of the National Gallery, but this is incorrect. It was
bought for what was regarded at the time as the enormous
price of £1102, lOs. by the Governors of the British
Institution, who also purchased the Sir Joshua, and
subsequently presented both pictures to the National
Gallery.
A portrait of Sir Peter Burrell was shown at Gains-
borough's gallery at the same time with The Market Cart.
The baronet was represented gun in hand, with his horse
standing by him, and a woodland landscape in the
background. In noticing this picture Bate ventured to
criticise Gainsborough ; or more probably to point out
what the artist himself disliked and had painted only to
please his cUent. It seems to have been a case of the
Tarleton portrait over again, and of Gainsborough
allowing himself to see with the eyes of another. " We
hint to Mr. Gainsborough," says the Morning Herald " to
reform the drapery of Sir Peter Burrell 's portrait. The
length of the thigh and leg, unbroken by a knee-band,
takes from either limb that excellence of shape which
it else would possess. If it is the fancy of the artist
he deserves reproof. If the taste of Sir Peter, he has
a right to please himself, although he is a sufferer by
it. The horse's head is finely painted and the landscape
of the first beauty. Nothing can exceed the foreground,
and the distances have a fine aerial effect." Evidently no
notice was taken of this criticism, as the baronet's legs
are to be seen to-day in the portrait, unbound by knee-
bands. Gainsborough at first intended to introduce
some dogs into the foreground of the picture, but after-
wards altered his mind. This portrait was never ex-
hibited in London until 1913, when it was shown (as
Lord Gwydyr) at the French Gallery, Pall Mall, within
two or three hundred yards of the house in which Sir
Peter sat for it. The catalogue described it as a work
of 1779, but it was painted in March and April 1787.
Gainsborough was at this time at the height of his
LONDON, 1787 275
prosperity. He was selling his landscapes and subject
pictures for excellent prices, and his services were more
than ever in demand for portraiture. His friend of the
Morning Herald, in speaking of the approaching depar-
ture from the gallery of such pictures as The Market Cart
and the Cottage Children with the Ass, laments that the
pressure of portrait commissions will probably prevent
the artist from replacing them for an indefinite period,
" When the room is thus stripped of its best ornaments
little else will remain to gratify the visiting eye ; and
when the loss will be supplied who can determine ? No
respite, it seems, can be allowed the artist from portrait -
painting ; and because he has lately advanced his terms
he is more sought after than ever. His prices are now
forty guineas for a three-quarters, eighty guineas for a
half-length and a hundred and sixty for a full length. Sir
Joshua's charges, are, however, still higher." Bate means
by " a three-quarters " not a three-quarter length por-
trait, but a head-size — a canvas about three-quarters of
a yard in length. These prices were maintained by
Gainsborough until the end of his life.
Always a lover of the Old Masters, Gainsborough was
a frequent buyer of pictures and had many transactions
with dealers, but, as will be seen later, he was not for-
tunate as a collector, and some of the pictures ascribed
by him to famous hands proved afterwards to be almost
unsaleable. In the spring of this year (1787) he made
his most important purchase. This was a picture by
Murillo of 5^. John in the Wilderness. It was brought
from Spain by Cumberland, who in a short time passed
it on to the dealer Desenfans, by whom it was sold to
Gainsborough for five hundred guineas. The Murillo
proved to be as bad a bargain financially as most of the
painter's speculations of a similar kind. Mrs. Gains-
borough sold it after her husband's death at a loss of
nearly a third of the original price.
In Hazlitt's Conversations with Northcote the old
276 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
Academician says of Gainsborough that, with all his
simplicity, he had wit too, and gives an example of one
of his repartees. " An eminent counsel once attempted
to puzzle him on some trial about the originality of a
picture by saying, ' I observe you lay great stress on the
phrase the painter's eye ; what do you mean by that ? *
' The painter's eye,' answered Gainsborough, ' is to him
what the lawyer's tongue is to you.' " Hazlitt gives
neither the date nor any further particulars of this trial,
which to the best of my belief has not been described
or even identified by modem writers on art history. It
was, however, an event of great interest. Many of the
important painters of Gainsborough's time were called
as witnesses, and the evidence of some of them was both
valuable and amusing.
The trial, which took place in the summer of 1787,
was between two picture dealers, Desenfans and Van-
dergucht, and the point at issue was the authenticity of
a picture by Poussin, which Vandergucht had sold to
Desenfans for /700. Both parties to the suit were well
kno^^'n to Reynolds and Gainsborough, and additional
piquancy was given to the affair by a rumour that the
great rivals would give evidence on opposite sides.
Noel Desenfans, the plaintiff in the case, has been
described as " half-trading, half -dilettante." Sir Joshua
used to laugh at Desenfans, and once intentionally de-
ceived him by allowing him to purchase a copy of a
Claude instead of the original, aftersvards returning his
cheque with a sarcastic note in which the President ex-
pressed his surprise that a man of such profound know-
ledge should have been so easily taken in. Desenfans
was closely associated with the artist Peter Francis
Bourgeois, with whom Gainsborough had long been on
friendly terms. Gainsborough had business transactions
with Desenfans, and, as we have seen, had bought from
him onl}" a few weeks before the trial the Murillo brought
from Spain by Cumberland. It was Desenfans who be-
LONDON, 1787 277
queathed to Bourgeois many of the pictures that are
now at the Duhvich Gallery. Benjamin Vandergucht,
the defendant in the case, was one of the first students
admitted to the schools of the Royal Academy. He
practised for some years as an artist, but ultimately
turned to picture dealing and " restoring." To his hands,
some months earlier, Reynolds had sorrowfully resigned
the damaged Titian belonging to the Earl of Upper
Ossory, after the Earl had refused to exchange it for
Gainsborough's Girl with Pigs. " The value of the pic-
ture," said Sir Joshua, " will be lessened in proportion
as he endeavours to make it better."
The picture over which these well-matched anta-
gonists were disputing was a large work. La Viergc aux
En/ants, which Desenfans had purchased with a war-
ranty that it was from the hand of Nicolas Poussin.
Desenfans had since been advised that the picture was
not by Poussin, and was now suing Vandergucht for the
return of the seven hundred pounds he had paid for it.
The first witness called was Peter Francis Bourgeois
(afterwards Sir Francis Bourgeois, R.A.). He testified
that in the preceding February Desenfans received a
letter from Vandergucht informing him that the magni-
ficent Poussin, of which he had already heard, had just
arrived from France ; that it was an undoubted original
of the great master, and, in point of composition and
handling, the first picture in Europe. " Dear Sir," said
Vandergucht in his letter, " represent to yourself seven-
teen fine children beautifully grouped, attending and
adoring the Virgin ! " Desenfans, said Bourgeois, had
thereupon hastened to see the masterpiece. On doing so,
he ventured to point out that certain parts in his opinion
did not suggest the hand of Poussin, but Vandergucht
declared that Mr. Benjamin West, who had been indulged
with a sight of the picture, had been struck with admira-
tion by its beauty, and had declared it to be the finest
and most exalted Poussin in existence. On the strength
278 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
of this Desenfans bought La Vierge aux Enfants for £700,
subject to the condition that Vandergucht should be
allowed to exhibit it publicly for six weeks.
Mr. Benjamin West, whose temporising attitude was
the subject of severe strictures after the trial, was then
called. West said he had considerable difficulty in deter-
mining with any degree of certainty and precision whether
the picture in question was a real Poussin or not. There
was something of Poussin about it, yet it had defects
which were unknown to him. The characters were gross,
the Madonna's head was too large ; the children's heads
wanted that grace and correctness of outline for which
Poussin was so conspicuous — and yet the features had
something of that master. If the picture were a Poussin
it must have been painted when he was studying Titian,
from whom one figure, the Cupid sitting on the drapery,
was almost a copy. Examined further, Mr. West ad-
mitted that he might have said flattering things about
the picture to Mr. Vandergucht, for it was a maxim with
him never to condemn when he could not applaud ; but
he " faintly denied " that he had ever professed great
admiration for it or positively declared it to be an un-
doubted Poussin.
The next witness was a well-known patron of the arts
at that period, Dr. Hinchliffe, Bishop of Peterborough,
who had not long before commissioned West to paint an
altar-piece for the chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge.
It was for Dr. Hinchliffe that J. T. Smith made the copies
of Rembrandt's etchings that were shown to Gainsborough,
and secured for the young student the privilege of admis-
sion to the painter's studio. The Bishop thought that
the picture sold by Vandergucht was a Poussin, but
modestly desired that no reliance might be placed on his
judgment, as he had frequently found himself deceived
in judging of the works of the different masters. He
had, however, a particular acquaintance with the works
of Poussin, and while believing the picture in dispute to
LONDON, I/87 279
be an original admitted that it was in no way compar-
able to an undoubted Poussin with the same title in the
collection of the Duke of Devonshire.
Sir Joshua Reynolds, who had been subpoenaed, was
to have succeeded the Bishop. His name was called in
court, but there was no reply, and after a brief interval
Gainsborough was summoned and stepped into the
box.
" Mr. Gainsborough declared that, having had no
opportunity for the study, he was no judge of the hands
of the Masters. He said, however, that he had seen
and studied most of the celebrated works of Poussin,
and that he had always been charmed with the sweet
simplicity of the effect and the elegance of the drawing,
but that when he saw the present picture it produced no
emotion. On a closer inspection he found it to be so
deficient in harmony, taste, ease, and elegance, that if he
had seen it in a broker's shop and could have bought it
for five shillings he should not have done so. On being
questioned whether something more than bare inspection
by the eye was necessary for a judge of pictures, Mr.
Gainsborough said he conceived the eye of a painter
to be equal to the tongue of a lawyer."
After Gainsborough followed his next door neighbour
in Pall Mall, Richard Cosway, R.A., who, condemning
the picture on the whole, admitted that there were certain
portions of it that might at a distance be taken for the
work of Poussin. To Cosway succeeded Mr. Udney, the
connoisseur who had sold to the Empress of Russia for
£25,000 a collection of pictures which he said he had
bought entirely on his own judgment. He had some
doubt, but would not have bought the picture as a
Poussin. INIr. William Bailey, the expert by whose
advice Lord Bute had purchased his collection, said he
did not think much of the opinion of painters in these
matters as a rule, although he agreed with most of them
about the picture under discussion. "There are many
ingenious painters," said Mr. Bailey scornfully, "who
28o THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
are no connoisseurs." Mr. John Singleton Copley, R.A.,
would not say that La Vierge aux Enfants was not a
Poussin, but thought it an inferior picture ; and after
several other artists and experts had been called, in-
cluding Mr. Joseph Farington, R.A., who did not answer,
Vandergucht's counsel made an amusing speech, in the
course of which he quoted Sterne : "Of all cants in this
canting world, though the cant of hypocrisy be the worst,
yet the cant of criticism is the most tormenting."
He then called his witnesses, but they showed poorly
in comparison with those on the opposite side. Two
French picture dealers from Paris, one of whom was the
husband of Madame Vigee Le Brun, gave evidence as to
the high opinion of La Vierge aux Enfants that existed
among the experts of that city ; and Mr. William
Hodges, R.A., and Mr. Walton, a pupil of Zoffany, ex-
pressed their opinions that the Poussin was a genuine
work. Mr. Justice Buller, in summing up the case, left
it to the jury upon the single point whether the picture
was or was not a Poussin, and the jury, after a very short
deliberation, decided in favour of Desenfans.
According to Edward Edwards, A.R.A., in his Anec-
dotes of Painters, Sir Joshua Reynolds gave it as his
private opinion that the picture was original, but he was
not subpoenaed owing to some misunderstanding which
had occurred between him and Vandergucht prior to the
litigation. The misunderstanding might well have been
over the affair of the Earl of Upper Ossory's Titian, but
the report of the trial throws some doubt upon the accu-
racy of the statement by Edwards. It shows clearly that
Sir Joshua was subpoenaed, and not upon the side of
Vandergucht. He was called by Desenfans.
The Morning Herald published some amusing com-
ments on the evidence, especially upon that of Benjamin
West, whose conduct is described as strictly that of an
American Loyalist, ready to join in turn the standard
either of King or Congress.
LONDON, 1787 281
" Never yet was anything half so sceptical. ' Turn
it,' says Mr. West to the man who had the picture in
court, ' a little towards me. And now from me. 'Tis
very like Poussin — 'Tis very unlike Poussin' — and thus
was an alternate preponderation in favour of and against
the picture kept up to the embarrassment of all who
had ears to hear the witness and eyes to see the picture.
Mr. West understands this sort of light and shade as well
as anybody, and, like Polonius, can convert ' a whale to a
camel, and a camel to an ouzel — yea, a black ouzel.' "
Gainsborough's reply to the counsel in cross-examina-
tion is noticed with admiration, and a version of it given
which differs sUghtly from those of Northcote and the
reporter of the trial :
" His repartee possessed that peculiarity of genius and
fancy for which his conversation is so remarkable. He
was asked ' whether he thought there was not something
necessary besides the eye to regulate an artist's opinion
respecting a picture ? ' His reply was ' that he believed
the veracity and integrity of a painter's eye was at least
equal to a pleader's tongue.' "
It has been supposed that Gainsborough never visited
the Continent, but he said at the trial that although
no judge of the blasters he had seen most of the
celebrated works of Poussin. This implied that he had
travelled abroad, and a visit to Flanders is mentioned in
a note published ten years after his death in the White-
hall Evening Review, which says of Gainsborough, " This
ingenious artist, one of the greatest honours of the
English School of Painting, used to say, comically enough,
of florid Gothic architecture that it was like a cake all
plumbs. The enthusiasm that he felt in the churches
when he went to Flanders he compared nearly to in-
sanity — ' the union,' added he, ' of fine paintings, fine
music, and the awful and imposing solemnities of reli-
gion.' " The statement in the Whitehall Evening Review
receives some support from the fact that Mrs. Gains-
282 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
borough sold for ten guineas, in 1797, a copy by her
husband of one of the Antwerp masterpieces — "Descent
from the Cross after the celebrated one of Rubens."
A fortnight after the trial Gainsborough sustained an
irreparable loss by the death of his friend Abel. He writes
to Bate on the afternoon of June 20 :
" Poor Abel died about one o'clock to-day, without
pain, after three days sleep. Your regret, I am sure,
will follow this loss. We love a genius for what he leaves
and we mourn him for what he takes away. If Abel was
not so great a man as Handel it was because caprice had
ruined music before he ever took up the pen. For my
part I shall never cease looking up to heaven — the little
while I have to stay behind— in hopes of getting one more
glance of the man I loved from the moment I heard him
touch the string. Poor Abel ! — 'tis not a week since we
were gay together, and that he wrote the sweetest air I
have in my collection of his happiest thoughts. My
heart is too full to say more."
The following day in the Morning Herald Bate pub-
lished a brief article on the musician's death ; quoting
a few words of the letter from Gainsborough, to whom, he
says, " Abel's attachment was unexampled."
Contemporary authorities agree in assigning a high
place in his profession to Abel, and William Jackson
declares that he had more real ability than any other
musician of his class. The extraordinary effect of his
music upon Gainsborough is described in another chapter,
composed of anecdotes concerning the painter and his
friends. Gainsborough, who had made the musician's
acquaintance at Bath, exhibited his portrait in 1777, the
first year that he contributed to the Royal Academy after
settling in London. Abel, it will be remembered, was
with Gainsborough when he was robbed by highwaymen
in the summer of 1775.
The Prince of Wales now renewed his promise to sit
again for the two portraits of him that Gainsborough
LONDON, 1787 283
had commenced. One of these was the equestrian
portrait, already mentioned, for which Mr. Coke had
given the commission two years and a half before. In
all this time it had not been carried very far, as the
question of the costume was still undecided, and it
seemed likely that " slight martial attire, with a mantle
of the Knight of the Garter over it," would be chosen
instead of the armour originally designed. Unfortunately
the Prince gave either no more sittings or not enough,
and both ]\Ir. Coke's portrait and its companion (intended
for some person of distinction whose name was not made
public) were left unfinished at Gainsborough's death.
It would be interesting to know what became of them,
for it is said that each "though just proceeded on,
contained proofs of astonishing likeness." Of the
portrait painted for Mr. Coke nothing is known at
Holkham, nor of the commission that led to its com-
mencement.
Sir Francis Sykes, of Basildon, Berks, a retired
Indian Governor who had been created a baronet a few
years before, was sitting at Schombcrg House this summer.
Another portrait in hand at the same time was that of
Mr. Knapp, the Clerk to the Haberdashers' Company,
which is said to be " excellent in all its qualities, and likely
to be a charming ornament to the City Hall in which
it is to be fixed." Mr. Knapp 's portrait still adorns the
Hall of the Haberdashers' Company, where it was placed
after leaving the painter's studio. It was lent for ex-
hibition at the Society of British Artists in 1834. In
common with the other pictures in the Hall it was after-
wards neglected, and many years ago was described by
a writer in the Art Journal as " repulsive in appear-
ance from coats of discoloured varnish." Now, cleaned,
and free from these superincumbent coverings, it hangs
in the Haberdashers' Hall an interesting example of
Gainsborough's last period.
Jerome Knapp had been Clerk to the Haberdashers'
284 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
Company for thirty-two years, when, in November, 1786,
it was decided at a meeting of the Court of Assistants to
acknowledge his services by an increase of salary and
by hanging a full-length portrait of him in the hall of
the company. The portrait was to be executed by
"the most eminent portrait-painter," but the expense
was not to exceed a hundred guineas, exclusive of a
Carlo Maratti frame. The most eminent portrait -painters
of the time were, of course, Reynolds and Gainsborough,
both of whom, however, charged more for a full-length
than the sum proposed. Apparently the Company
increased its offer, as Gainsborough accepted the com-
mission for a hundred and twenty guineas in February,
1787, just before he raised his price for a full-length to
the maximum of a hundred and sixty guineas. The
portrait was finished early in June, and some interesting
extracts from the Company's acount books for 1787,
which Mr. Eagleton, the present Clerk, was kind enough to
send me, give the dates of the payment for the picture
and the frame :
"September 5th. Paid Mr. Gainsborough for painting Mr.
Knapp's picture pursuant to order at Court of Assistants on the 14th
of February 1787. ^126 o o.
" September 28th. Paid Mr. Flaxman, Carver and Gilder, for the
frame to Mr. Knapp's picture, pursuant to order of Court. ^16 12 2."
The minutes of the Court of Assistants show that Gains-
borough altered the portrait after its completion, but
not because of any fault in the likeness or painting.
Mr. Knapp is shown holding a paper in his hand addressed
to the Master and \^ ardens of the Company, and on this
it is supposed that some too presumptuous Haberdasher
— who had perhaps conducted the negotiations with
Gainsborough — had caused his own name to be inscribed.
The minutes of September 19, 1787, a fortnight after the
payment was made to the artist, contain the following
record :
THE WOOD.MAX
Fyom the engraving by Simon
LONDON, 1787 285
" Upon motion made and seconded, the order respect-
ing the painting Mr. Knapp's picture, dating the loth
November, 1786, was read, and it being observed that
an inscription had been painted by the direction of Mr.
Joseph Malpas, in which his name was inserted without
any authority from this Company it was moved, seconded,
and carried in the affirmative that the whole of the said
inscription be erased from the picture, and Mr. Knapp
was directed to apply to Mr. Gainsborough for that
purpose."
The portrait of Mr. John Smith, Clerk to the Drapers'
Company from 1773 to 1797, now hanging in the Drapers'
Hall, was also completed in 1787.
In June Gainsborough was painting TJic Woodman,
the work which he believed to be his best, and the one
which, in the pathetic letter written from his death-
bed, he professed himself anxious for Sir Joshua to see.
This WoodtJian, the most important of several pictures
by Gainsborough to which the title has been applied,
was already in an advanced state in the third week of
June, and received the last touches from his brush in the
following month. Bate, when describing the picture in
July, tells us something of the man whose appearance
inspired Gainsborough to paint him. He says :
" This wonderful memorial of genius is a portrait,
the original being a poor smith worn out by labour, and
now a pensioner upon accidental charity. Mr. Gains-
borough was struck with his careworn aspect and took
him home ; he enabled the needy wanderer by his gene-
rosity to live — and made him immortal by his art ! He
painted him in the character of a woodman ; and to
account for his dejected visage introduced a violent storm.
He appears sheltering under a tree ; at a small distance
in the background his cottage is seen. The action of
his dog, who is starting with his head reversed, is well
expressive of a momentary burst of thunder. A brilliancy
of colour on the woodman's rustic weeds is also descriptive
of the hghtning's flash."
Side by side with The Woodman another well-known
286 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
canvas was advancing towards completion in the studio
at Schomberg House. This was the group, now in
the collection of Lord Rothschild, containing the por-
traits of the four children of the first Earl of Romney,
and known to-day as The Marsham Family. These
children— Charles afterwards second Lord Romney, and
his three younger sisters— were painted in July, and
represented gathering fruit in an orchard. The dog
shown in the foreground is a portrait of one of their
pets, Fidele.
The eldest of the three girls, Frances, the one who
holds the cherries in her apron, must, I think, have been
the last to survive of Gainsborough's sitters. It seems
astonishing that there are people of middle age who
have seen and spoken to a woman who sat to Gains-
borough, but Frances Marsham, who was in her ninth
year when this picture was painted, hved to be ninety,
and died in June, 1868. She was married in 1805 to
Sir John Buchanan-Riddell, whom she survived nearly
fifty years.
The incessant eulogy of Gainsborough in the Morning
Herald, although in the main not undeserved, did not fail
to cause some irritation among artists who were less
favoured. This irritation shows itself at times in com-
ments published in other journals. A remarkable instance
is an article that appeared in the summer of 1787 in
the World, the paper whose critic Bate had reproved
in January for presuming to compare Romney with his
adored painter of Pall Mall. It shows that Gainsborough
was at this time on bad terms with De Loutherbourg,
whose scenic effects he admired in earlier ^^ears. The ill-
feeling between the two painters originated perhaps in con-
nection with the Academy's refusal in 1784 to hang the
group of the three Princesses as Gainsborough wished, for
De Loutherbourg, according to the Morning Post, was on
the Council that year. Two months before this article
appeared in the World, the Morning Herald, in a review
LONDON, 1787 287
of the Royal Academy, had criticised unfavourably De
Loutherbourg's picture, View of Snowdon from Llanheris
Lake, and at the same time expressed the opinion that
Gainsborough's studies of the Lakes were attempts that
would never be surpassed. Apparently there was not
much to find fault with in this criticism, but taken in
conjunction with the following paragraph pubhshed in
the Morning Herald in July, it seems to have given
great offence.
" Mr. Loutherbourg has quitted the country, and has
left numbers to criticise of the effects of his distances
who have hitherto been pleased with his foreground."
The offending paragraph was reprinted a day or two
later in the World, at the head of an article signed
" Tycho," which ran as follows :
" If the above paragraph (which appeared in the
Herald of last Saturday) has any meaning at all it is to
convey a reflection that Mr. De Loutherbourg has quitted
this country in an underhand manner and means not
to return. In respect to the first part, Mr. De Louther-
bourg has acquired by talent and industry a fortune,
if not so brilliant as the Rev. Reputation Butcher's, at
least competent to satisfy fully every person who has
any demand on him ; and who have only to apply at
his house in Hammersmith for that purpose. The plain
truth is engravers are the principal employers of the
painters of the present day (formerly Princes and the
Nobility were the patrons !) ; and in consequence of an
engagement with one of the most ingenious artists in
Europe, Mr. Michel, the engraver of Basle, Mr. De
Loutherbourg has gone to paint the lakes of Geneva —
a subject which seems so peculiarly adapted to the
brilliancy of Mr. De Loutherbourg's pencil as to reflect
the highest honour on the judgment of his employer.
" Mr. De Loutherbourg has, on no other account than
this {pro tempore) quitted England, a place to which he is
attached by inclination, where he is honoured with the
applause of the best judges, and where he has friends
who will not see the assassin's dagger hfted up to stab
his reputation in his absence without attempting to ward
off the blow. The quarter all these attacks come from
288 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
is well known, and the cause of them at some future time
shall be given to the World ; * and sorry are we to see
one artist of rank suffer his mercenary literary friend to
be the Herald of his fame and in the same column to
be the calumniator of a brother artist's reputation.
" Tycho.
" * The artist alluded to is always pviffed in the same
page Mr. De Loutherbourg is abused in."
The editor of the Morning Herald was a dangerous
person to quarrel with, and the last man to overlook
such an attack as this. What he said or did at the office
of the World is not recorded, but an apology appeared
promptly in the columns of that journal. In this it was
explained that the article signed " Tycho " was sent to
the paper as an advertisement and paid for accordingly.
However, the editor of the World had authority to say
that the insinuations against a reverend gentlemen as
the supposed wTiter of an article on the ingenious Mr. De
Loutherbourg were unmerited. So far from detracting
from the merits of Mr. De Loutherbourg he was an
admirer of that artist's professional talents, and further
he had not for some time past taken an active part in the
conduct of the Morning Herald.
The fact was that Bate was now a wealthy man, and
was doing by deputy as much as possible of his journalistic
work. He had recently inherited a fortune, and the
Morning Herald, of which he was sole proprietor as well
as editor, had grown into a valuable property. Naturally
a sportsman, and of the most hospitable disposition, he
was enjoying the life of a rich country squire on his
estate at Bradwell in Essex, where he was recognised as
a magistrate whose activity and attention to his honorary
duties were unequalled in the locality, and, according to
Arthur Young, as " the most distinguished cultivator in
Essex." Bradwell is a lonely parish in the north-eastern
part of the county, bounded on three sides by the sea
and the estuary of the Blackwater River. Bate had some
LONDON, 1787 289
years earlier purchased the next presentation to the
valuable living of Bradwell, a purchase that subsequently
cost him much trouble and litigation. He built himself
a house and spent large sums in recovering land from
the sea (for which he was awarded the gold medal of
the Society of Arts), and in improving the roads in the
neighbourhood. There are constant references in the
journals of the period to the coursing meetings, yacht
races, and " florists' feasts," at which he offered prizes
for competition. He had among other things a great
decoy at Bradwell, and it was announced that in one frost
alone he had captured ten thousand wild ducks. There
were many visitors to Bradwell in the summer months,
and one of them paid a tribute in verse to the hospitality
and good humour of the master of the house, which was
printed in the Universal Magazine :
" To the mansion of Bradwell, its meadows and bowers,
Where the heart deem'd for minutes what time meant for hours
I inscribe this rude verse. . . .
What charms have I known the blest morning restore
As it broke on the sea which surrounds Bradwell's shore
When the far-distant sail on the sight perfect grew,
And the Isle of fair Mersea just rose to the view,
And while the shrill sea-birds in many a flight
Ascended to sport in the new-risen light !
But hail to the roof which received us at night,
Where the laugh went around and each look spoke delight !
A sadness indeed sometimes darkened the mind ;
For the owner was absent ! — And what left behind
Could atone for that loss ?— But at praise I've no hit,
Or I'd prove his good nature exceeded his wit."
The experiment of controlling a daily paper from a
remote part of Essex, even with the frequent visits to
London that were perhaps the absences his guest laments,
was not altogether successful, and the editor was soon
afterwards obliged actively to resume the duties of his
office. But whether he directed the fortunes of the
T
290 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
Morning Herald from Bra dwell or from Catherine Street,
the interests of Gainsborough were never overlooked.
The painter, after the episode of the World article, was
pushed more than ever in the columns of the Herald, and
there is some reason for thinking that he was a visitor to
Bra dwell in the year of which I am writing. Gains-
borough's portrait of Bate's wife (the Lady Bate-Dudley
now in Lady Burton's collection) was painted in the
summer of 1787, and there is a tradition that this was
done at Bradwell.
Two commissions of an uncommon land were accepted
in July. One, of which I have found no other record, was
from General Sloper, who, says Bate, wanted Gains-
borough to paint " an interview between the late amiable
Mrs. Sloper, who is to be spiritualised in the represen-
tation, and her two surviving daughters." The other
commission was given by the Duke of Montague, who
wished for a full-length portrait of himself, to be painted,
not from life, but from a half-length belonging to the
Duchess of Buccleuch, and executed by Gainsborough
some years earlier. It will be remembered that a similar
task was accomplished by him in 1776 when he painted
from a half-length by Hudson the full-length portrait
of Lord Folkestone that belongs to the Society of Arts.
Other portraits finished by the end of the summer of
1787 were those of Mr. Langston, the Marquis of
Buckingham (painted in his Garter robes), and Mr. Pitt.
The portraits of the Marquis and of Pitt were both
intended for Stowe.
The Duke of York, the only member of the Royal
Family who had not been painted by Gainsborough, made
arrangements in October to give sittings to the artist
for a full-length portrait to hang in the State Room at
Carlton House. Late in November it is announced that
the Duke "has done Mr. Gainsborough the honour to
sit for two portraits ; one of these is for Her Majesty,
and the other for that distinguished patron of pictorial
LONDON. 1787 291
genius, the Prince of Wales." But this announcement
seems to have been made prematurely. Probably the
Duke had promised to come to Schomberg House and
afterwards altered his plans, for at the end of December
another statement appears to the effect that his High-
ness " is within a few days to sit to Ih. Gainsborough for
the two portraits which we some time since mentioned."
However, there is no further mention of a sitting, and
eight months afterwards, in his obituary notice of Gains-
borough, Bate makes it clear that the portraits — even if
commenced — were never completed. He says : " All our
living Princes and Princesses were painted by him — the
Duke of York excepted, of whom he had three pictures
bespoken."
A note by the same writer in November, 1787, gives
us the date of a picture about which there has been much
speculation among connoisseurs and experts. Sir Walter
Armstrong has ascribed the Wood Gatherers (originally
called Cottage Children) to some time in Gainsborough's
Bath period, but it proves to have been one of the last
works from his brush. After a visit to the studio at
Schomberg House, Bate says :
" A landscape of uncommon merit has been painted
lately by Mr. Gainsborough. It is a picturesque scene,
and although limited in extent of country is beautifully
romantic. It contains a rustic history that cannot fail
to impart delight to every beholder. Three peasant
children are introduced ; one of them, a young girl, has
an infant brother in her arms ; the other, a little boy
of about six years, appears to have been engaged in the
task of collecting the broken branches of trees for fire-
wood ; he is resting on a bank in conversation with his
sister. A pastoral innocence and native sensibiUty give
inexpressible beauty to these charming little objects.
They cannot be viewed without the sensations of tender-
ness and pleasure, and an interest for their humble fate.
This picture, we learn, has been sold to Lord Porchester
at a high price, but as we hope to obtain another view
of it before it is sent to the mansion of the noble possessor,
292 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
we will make such mention of it as may give some
additional idea of its merits."
A few days later the picture was seen by the King,
who paid Lord Porchester a high compliment upon his
taste in selecting such an admirable work. Lord Por-
chester, afterwards created Earl of Carnarvon, was the
great-great-grandfather of the present peer of that name,
and the canvas purchased in 1787 is still at Highclere.
This picture, the Cottage Children, as it was then
called, is the one I have already mentioned as ranked
by Hazlitt before the more famous Cottage Girl with
Dog and Pitcher. Hazlitt, who saw them together at
the exhibition of Gainsborough's pictures at the British
Institution — an exhibition which he reviewed in the
Morning Chronicle in 1814 — says :
" Of the fancy pictures, on which Gainsborough's
fame chiefly rests, we are disposed to give the preference
to his Cottage Children. There is, we apprehend, greater
tiuth, variety, force, and character in this group than
in any other. The colouring of the light-haired child
is particularly true to nature, and forms a natural and
innocent contrast to the dark complexion of the elder
sister who is carrying it."
A sketch or study for this picture is in the National
Gallery. It forms part of the Vernon Collection.
The boy, who is seen in the foreground of the Cottage
Children or Wood Gatherers, appears to be none other
than the Richmond child. Jack Hill, whom Gainsborough
painted several times, and whom his daughter is said
to have wished to adopt. Gainsborough, immediately
after selUng the Cottage Children, commenced another
study of rustic hfe, and in December we are told, — " The
Boy who is the subject of Lord Porchester's admirable
landscape has been introduced in another picture. The
scene is a cottage fireside on a frosty winter morning.
The Boy seems to derive the most gratifying pleasure
from the heat, although it appears to be more|than he
LONDON, 1787 293
can well bear." This picture is the one afterwards known
as Jack Hill in his Cottage, and the companion to it,
showing the same boy with a cat, in the open air, was
painted at the same time. " We must notice the boy and
cat," writes a critic, "it is a natural representation, and
a picture that will live for ever as a chaste and beautiful
effort of the art." Small versions of both these studies
of Jack Hill were exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in
1885 ; and larger ones at the Academy Old Masters in
1883. The measurements of the larger ones correspond
almost exactly with those of the originals which were
included in the sale at Gainsborough's house in 1789.
The artist Briggs, Margaret Gainsborough's Acton friend,
asserted in a letter written in 1829, that John Hill Warming
Himself, as he calls the cottage picture, had been prac-
tically destroyed, " cracked and split to pieces, but filled
up, repaired, and daubed all over by Bigg." WilUam
Bigg, R.A., who is accused, rightly or wrongly, of this
act of vandalism, was a contemporary, and to some
extent a follower of Gainsborough.
Although he had refused to paint for Boydell's Shakes-
peare Gallery, Gainsborough accepted a commission late
in the autumn of 1787 from Macklin, who was planning
an exhibition of pictures illustrating the British poets.
Gainsborough was busy too at this time in many other
ways, and produced, in addition to portraits, a landscape
with figures of peasants and a dog, and a donkey laden
with firewood. The landscape did not entirely please
his friend of the Morning Herald, who seems to have
been disappointed that the artist had not ennobled the
donkey as he did most of the human beings that he
painted.
" The peasants and the dog merit praise, but the ass can
not be compUmented for that superiority of character
which generally belongs to Mr. Gainsborough's animals.
It appears as if the artist in his adherence to nature had
really painted the animal as it presented itself to his
294 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
notice, with more than the common portion of misery
which falls to that class of the brute creation."
It seems likely that this was the picture purchased by
Lady Hoare at Gainsborough's sale in 1789. Another work
accomplished in the autumn of 1787 was the retouching
and improving of a landscape with figures of a somewhat
earlier date, the description of which corresponds to that
of The Beggars, exhibited at Gainsborough's house in
1784.
The portraits in the studio at the end of December
included those of Mrs. Welbore Ellis (Lady Mendip), and
a beautiful Irishwoman, Mrs. Pujet of Dublin, the
daughter of the Bishop of Raphoe. " Mrs. Pujet," de-
clared Bate, always appreciative of feminine charms,
" has had her portrait exquisitely painted by Mr. Gains-
borough. The canvas seems to possess the animation of
nature — never yet was a picture more Uke life."
Although no longer contributing to the Academy,
Gainsborough was not unconscious of the advantages of
exhibiting with more publicity than his own gallery
afforded. The Liverpool Society for promoting the Arts
of Painting and Design held an exhibition in the autumn
of 1787, and to it Gainsborough sent A Village Girl with
Milk and Cottage Children. As the original version of
Cottage Children, described earlier in this chapter, was
purchased by Lord Porchester immediately after it was
painted, it is likely that the picture sent to Liverpool
was the small prehminary study now in the National
Gallery.
There were signs in the autumn of the development
of a more friendly feeling towards the Academy, which
suggested that a reconciliation between Gainsborough
and his fellow-members was not impossible. The records
preserved at Burlington House show that he offered at
this time, through his friend Edmund Garvey, R.A., " to
paint a picture for the chimney in the Council Room
in the place of that formerly proposed to be painted by
LONDON, 1787 295
Mr. Cipriani." This was indeed heaping coals of fire on
the heads of the Forty, for the placing of Lady Horatia
Waldegrave's portrait on the chimney-board of the
Large Room in 1783 was really the beginning of Gains-
borough's final quarrel with the Academicians.
The offer to paint the chimney-picture was made in
September, and there are later indications that Gains-
borough, had he lived longer, might have reappeared
among the exhibitors at Somerset House. In December,
for the first time since the great quarrel about the picture
of the Princesses, he took part in an Academy election,
and he was again a voter in March, 1788, when John
Russell was promoted to full membership.
It is certain that although Gainsborough presented
no diploma picture, he meant to add a specimen of his
work to the collection which was being formed at Somer-
set House. When Margaret Gainsborough gave the
Academicians the Romantic Landscape with Sheep at a
Fountain that now hangs in the Diploma Gallery, Bate,
in announcing her gift said that she made it "in com-
pliance with the intention of her late father." The
minutes of the Council show that the picture was re-
ceived with much pleasure by the Academicians who,
as an expression of their gratitude for " so inestimable
an addition to their collection, and as a mark of the high
respect they have for the Memory of her Father," be-
stowed upon Miss Gainsborough a silver cup, suitably
inscribed, which cost 16(), 17s. lod. The well-known
portrait of Gainsborough by himself, now in the Council
Room at Burlington House, was also presented to the
Academy by Miss Gainsborough, but at a much later
period.
CHAPTER XVI
LONDON, 1788
The King and the Woodman — A remarkable letter — Gainsborough
tells the story of his first picture — The Cornard Wood in the
National Gallery — Constable's uncle — Macklin's "Poet's Gallery"
Boy or Girl ? — Lady Petre's portrait — The Duke of Norfolk
— The trial of Warren Hastings — Gainsborough's illness — Dr.
Heberden's opinion — A hopeful verdict — -Gainsborough makes
his will — Paints a landscape — Richmond — A vain hope — He
returns to die — The interview with Reynolds — Gainsborough
shows him his pictures — Thinks he may yet finish them — Death
and funeral — The Will — Mrs. Gainsborough's savings — A simple
tomb — His last portrait — The widow advised by Reynolds and
West — Forged pictures — Bate and the Academicians — Fuseli.
The last year of the great painter's life opened auspi-
ciously, for in January he was summoned to Buckingham
House. The King, who was always interested in Gains-
borough's work, had heard rumours of the fine qualities
of the newly painted Woodma7i, and wished to see it.
The artist took the Woodman to Buckingham House,
where it was duly admired by the Royal Family, and
above all by the King, who described the picture as
" a masterpiece of the pencil." Unfortunately he did
not buy it, although stories were afloat that he intended
to do so.
Early in the spring of 1788 Gainsborough wrote the
letter to which I referred in the opening chapter of this
book. It is a letter in which he describes the origin and
history of the first important picture from his hand, the
landscape known to an earlier generation as Gams-
borough's Forest, but now catalogued at the National
Gallery as Wood Scene, Village of Cornard. It was the
painting of this landscape that induced Gainsborough's
father to send his son to study art in London. The letter
296
LONDON, 1788 297
was written in connection with a sale of pictures, of
which Gainsborough's Forest was one.
On the 8th of March, 1788, Greenwood, the American
artist, who had abandoned the brush in favour of the
hammer and was now a successful auctioneer, sold at his
rooms in Leicester Square the collection of paintings
formed by Mr. Richard Morrison, a gentleman who had
a house in Great Portland Street, but was leaving London
to live in the country. Accordingly he was disposing of
his library and of his pictures, among which was " par-
ticularly, very capital ... a Landscape by Mr. Gains-
borough, it is presumed has no equal." The sale of this
picture attracted some attention, and Bate, always
anxious to obtain news of Gainsborough's work, wrote
to him for information about the matter. He embodied
the artist's reply in an article that is in part composed
of Gainsborough's own words :
" Mr. Gainsborough.
" A Landscape by this distinguished artist having been
lately purchased by Alderman Boydell, for seventy-five
guineas, it may not be unacceptable to mention a curious
anecdote relative to it which cannot fail but to enhance
the value.
" This is one of the first pictures Mr. Gainsborough
produced ; he painted it at Sudbury in the year 1748,
at which time he was a schoolboy. This early proof of
genius determined his father to send him to London to
study, but he appears to have found a preferable school
in sequestered nooks, woody uplands, retired cottages,
the avenues of a forest, sheep, cattle, villagers, and
woodmen. These were the true sources for the culti-
vation of a mind so strongly impregnated with the seeds
of fine fancy attached to the wild beauties of nature ;
and whose inclination for landscape was drawn forth
by these rustic objects rather than by the example of
any master whatsoever. It may be worth remark that
though there is no great idea of composition in this
picture, the touch and close imitation in the study of
the parts and minutice are equal to any of Mr. Gains-
298 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
borough's later productions. We must also observe that
this picture has been eagerly sought for, and been at
intervals in the possession of various dealers for the last
forty years."
A comparison of this article with the letter itself,
which Bate pubUshed after Gainsborough's death, shows
that the journalist has not altogether grasped the artist's
meaning. Gainsborough does not mean that he painted
the picture " in the year 1748, at which time he was
still a schoolboy." He began the picture when a school-
boy, and the ability he displayed in it induced his father
to send him to London to study, but in 1748, when it
was finished and sent upon its travels, he was a married
man of one-and-twenty. The letter is of singular interest
and value, for it is the only known record, written by
his own hand, of the beginning of Gainsborough's career
as a painter. It shows, too, that Gainsborough was
still living at Sudbury in 1748 — a year or two later than
has hitherto been supposed. The letter was printed by
Bate, with an introductory note, as follows :
" Graphic Genius.
"A very early instance of Gainsborough's powers in
landscape is to be seen in the fine picture Alderman
Boy dell purchased. This charming performance possesses
all the brilliancy and freshness of a picture just from the
easel, and yet, astonishing as it may appear, it has been
painted upwards of forty years. The following letter was
written by Mr. Gainsborough upon the subject, and as
it decides upon the point of time when the picture was
finished, we are happy to publish it as a proof of the
extraordinary skill of this self-taught artist while under
the age of twenty, and as a proof that the magical effect
and brilliancy of his landscapes does not evaporate.
" My dear Sir, — You have thanked me handsomely
for what has not been handsomely done, but I intend you
shall have something better soon.
"Mr. Boydell bought the large landscape you speak
LONDON, 1788 299
of for seventy-five guineas last week at Greenwood's.
It is in some respects a little in the schoolboy stile — but I
do not reflect on this without a secret gratification ; for,
as an early instance how strong my inclination stood for
Landskip, this picture was actually painted at Sudbury
in the year 1748 ; it was begun before I left school ; — and
was the means of my Father's sending me to London.
"It may be worth remark that though there is very
little idea of composition in the picture, the touch and
closeness to nature in the study of the parts and minutm
are equal to any of my latter productions. In this
explanation I do not wish to seem vain or ridiculous, but
do not look on the Landskip as one of my riper perfor-
mances.
"It is full forty years since it was first delivered by
me to go in search of those who had taste to admire it !
Within that time it has been in the hands of twenty
picture dealers, and I once bought it myself during that
interval for Nineteen Guineas. Is not that curious? — Yours,
my dear Sir, most sincerely,
Thomas Gainsborough."
" Pall Mall, March 11, 1788."
A footnote to this letter, printed in the Morning Herald,
explains that the matter referred to by Gainsborough in
the opening paragraph was a present of some drawings.
These are perhaps the seven sketches of landscapes in
chalk, presented to the National Gallery in 1878 by
Mr. Thomas Birch Wolfe, the nephew of Sir Henry Bate-
Dudley. Gainsborough's letter was forwarded to Boydell
immediately after its publication, in order that he might
know the exact history of the picture to which it refers.
Boydell no doubt bought the landscape with a view
to preparing the engraving in aquatint by Mary Catherine
Prestel, which was pubUshed in 1790. The landscape
was on view when the Boydells opened the Shakespeare
Gallery early in that year, and was noticed particularly
in the Gazetteer by a critic whose comparison of the honest
realism of Gainsborough's picture with the conventionali-
ties of some other contemporary landscapes is not without
interest.
300 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
Writing in May, 1790, he says :
" Many of our landscape painters have made their
pictures by a receipt. Never having Hved out of the
metropohs or seen any green thing except a pickled
cucumber in an oil shop, they form their ideas upon the
style of the old Flemish masters, copy their trees from
Hobbema, their water from Ruysdael, and their docks and
weeds from Wynants. Very different was the conduct
of Mr. Gainsborough when he painted his landscape.
The woods of Suffolk were his Academy, the trees were
his models ; and instead of casts from Grecian statues,
the sunburnt inhabitants of his native village were the
figures which he contemplated and copied. WTien he
painted this picture he was not twenty years of age, but
at this early period he saw and imitated Nature as she is,
without meditating through the misty medium of former
masters. In his later works his aim seems to be giving
general effects, slight hints at form.s to which the eye of
the spectator must give names — in one word, to make
elegant blots ; and so fascinating was his taste that
whatever style he adopted became agreeable.
" But here we see a landscape in which every tree, every
bough, one may almost say every leaf, is a portrait. With
finishing equal or superior to any of the Flemish school,
it has the force of a sketch. The forms of the trees, the
bark, the exuberantly rich foreground, the woodmen and
peasants, the two asses, are perfectly EngHsh, and prove
that when ]\Ir. Gainsborough painted cattle or figures
he did not apply to prints from Berghem, Cuyp, or
Paul Potter, but delineated them from the figures which
he saw. The picture is placed too near the eye, in a more
elevated situation the distant view of the village in the
background would keep its proper distance."
After the death of Alderman Boydell the landscape
became the property of Mr. Watts, who lent it for ex-
hibition at the British Institution in 1814, where it was
described in the Ust of Gainsborough's works as A Woody
Scene in his earlier manner. Mr. Watts, who died in
1816, had one daughter, Mary, who was married in
1811 to Mr. Jesse Russell, sometime Member of Parlia-
ment for the pocket borough of Gatton. Mrs. Russell
LONDON, 1788 301
inherited all her father's property, and her husband by
Royal Hcence adopted the name of Watts in addition
to his own. Mr. Watts Russell died at an advanced age
in 1875, and at the sale of his pictures in the same year
this landscape was purchased for the National Gallery
for ;^I207, los. The Watts Russell pictures were sold
at Christie's, and the Gainsborough landscape was cata-
logued as A Wood Scene with Figures, a View near the
Village of Cornard in Suffolk. The name of Cornard seems
therefore to have been attached to the picture for the
first time while it was in the Watts Russell collection,
but on what grounds it is impossible now to say. The
appellation was probably conjectural, for there is nothing
in the picture to connect it particularly with the neigh-
bourhood of Cornard, except the spire of the little church,
and that might equally well belong to any one of a score
of Suffolk villages. Great Cornard itself, whatever it
may have been in Gainsborough's time, is now a prosaic
and uninteresting suburb of Sudbury.
One point remains to be noted about the landscape
which was the starting-point of Gainsborough's career
as an artist, and is now by a happy chance in the nation's
keeping. It concerns the identity of Mr. Watts, the
owner of the picture, after the death of Boydell. His
name is mentioned in the National Gallery catalogue and
in some of the books on Gainsborough, but no one seems
to have suspected that this gentleman was Mr. David
Pike Watts, of Portland Place, the uncle, and the staunch
friend and supporter of John Constable, R.A. Mr.
Watts, whose sister Ann was Constable's mother, helped
his nephew in his earlier days both with money and advice,
and had sufficient interest with the British Institution
to obtain for him an invitation to the great dinner that
inaugurated in 1813 the exhibition of the works of Sir
Joshua Reynolds. To the exhibition of the following
year at the British Institution Mr. Watts contributed
his Gainsborough landscape, but Constable says nothing
302 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
about it in the letters of that year pubhshed in his bio-
graphy, or of the many other pictures by Gainsborough
shown on the same occasion. However, Constable must
have been well acquainted with the landscape, as he used
to stay with his uncle in Portland Place, and he is not
likely to have overlooked a picture by the master whose
work he almost worshipped.
In April, 1788, a few weeks after Boydell had pur-
chased the landscape at Greenwood's rooms, Macklin
opened his " Poets' Gallery," to which Gainsborough
had promised to contribute. He was as good as his
word, and the collection of nineteen pictures illustrating
passages from the British poets included two from his
brush, Young Hobbinol and Ganderetia, and Lavinia.
The first was nominally inspired by Somerville ; the
second purported to be a representation of the beauteous
orphan in Thomson's Seasons :
"The lovely young Lavinia once had friends,
And fortune smiled deceitful on her birth."
However, Thomson's lines certainly were not responsible
for the inspiration of Gainsborough's Lavinia, for the
work so-called was none other than the study of a child
with a pan of milk, already described as painted in 1786,
Bate, while praising the picture for its artistic merits,
laughs at it as " oddly perverted by Macklin to the
Lavinia of Thomson," and with some sarcastic allusions
to Madame D'Eon, insists more than once that it should
be described as the Cottage Boy. The artist was well
paid for both works. According to some figures pub-
lished soon after Mackhn's death in 1801, Gainsborough
received £300 for Lavinia, and £350 for Young Hobbinol,
and Gander etta.
The beautiful full-length portrait of Lady Petre
walking in a wood (now in America, in the collection of
Mr. H. E. Huntingdon) was painted in the spring of
1788, and is one of Gainsborough's last works. The
LONDON, 1788 303
original of this portrait, Miss Juliana Howard, was
married to the ninth Lord Petre in January, and on the
24th of March, soon after she had returned from the honey-
moon, the announcement was made that the bride " in-
tended sitting to jVIr. Gainsborough for her picture." The
sittings must have been begun and completed within the
four weeks following, as on the 19th of April the chronicler
was able to announce that the portrait was finished, and
was so beautiful and correct a likeness that it almost
rivalled her while it seemed to flatter.
Lady Petre's brother, Mr. Howard, who was also painted
in 1788, appears to have commenced his sittings even
later than his sister, as in May (after the first pubhc noti-
fication of Gainsborough's illness) his portrait is mentioned
as being then unfinished, and not satisfactory to the artist
in point of attitude. Unfortunately, Mr. Howard's Chris-
tian name is not given, and we cannot tell which of Lady
Petre's brothers was sitting at Schomberg House. The
portrait just mentioned may be the full-length in black
of the eldest brother, Bernard Edward, afterwards twelfth
Duke of Norfolk, which is now in the possession of the pre-
sent Duke, who also owms the full-length in black of Duke
Charles, to which I have already referred.
It must have been very soon after the completion of
Lady Petre's portrait that Gainsborough, on the high tide
of success, and painting with undiminished powers, was
attacked by the illness which ultimately proved fatal to
him. Sir George Beaumont, who knew Gainsborough well,
declared that sometime before his illness he had a premoni-
tion of death, and begged Sheridan to promise to attend
his funeral — as he did. Gainsborough's indisposition
began with a chill, caught at Westminster Hall, where all
London was flocking in the earlier months of 1788, to
hear the speeches in the famous trial of Warren Hastings.
All London, that is to say, that could obtain admission
to the Hall, which was not easy, for the public anxiety
to witness the proceedings was extraordinary, and when
304 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
Sheridan was speaking fifty guineas were offered for a
good seat. Gainsborough, however, had a friend in court
in the person of Sir Peter Burrell, the purchaser of The
Market Cart. Acting for his wife, Sir Peter, as Deputy
Great Chamberlain, had charge of the arrangements con-
nected with the trial, and his name appeared on all the
tickets of admission.
It has been assumed, without any apparent ground,
that Gainsborough caught cold on the opening day of
the trial, February 13th ; the day when his rival. Sir
Joshua Reynolds, attended in full dress and saluted
Fanny Bumey from the managers' box, and when the
Prince of Wales and his brothers were so chilled by the
damp and frigid air of the great Hall that they were com-
pelled to beat a speedy retreat to Alice's Coffee House.
But the trial of Warren Hastings, which lasted for years,
occupied many weeks of 1788, and it must have been some
time after the opening day that Gainsborough, when
listening to the impassioned eloquence of his friends,
Sheridan and Burke, became conscious of the cold spot
on the back of his neck, which was the herald of calamity.
According to Allan Cunningham (who in this matter may
be rehed upon, as his informant was the painter's niece,
Mrs. Lane), Gainsborough was taken ill immediately after
his return from Westminster Hall. This was probably
late in April, as a letter exists written by Gainsborough
in that month, in which he speaks of his illness, but hope-
fully, and says that his physician believes it to be merely
a swollen gland. The physician was Dr. Heberden, his
next-door neighbour, and one of the most distinguished
practitioners of the day, who declared, as Gainsborough
states in a letter of May ist, that he had known many
similar swellings dispersed without subsequent mischief.
Yet, in spite of the opinion of Dr. Heberden, which
was supported by that of the surgeon John Hunter, there
was evident cause for alarm, and the patient himself
suspected it. Gainsborough made his will at once, and
LONDON, 1788 305
that document, carefully drawn up and providing for all
contingencies, was signed on the 5th of May. The first
public announcement concerning his illness was made
four or five days later in the following terms :
" We state with infinite regret that Mr. Gainsborough
has been for some weeks past so much indisposed as to
be unable to exercise his pencil. His indisposition pro-
ceeds from a violent cold caught in Westminster Hall ;
the glands of his neck have been in consequence so
much inflamed as to require the aid of ]\Ir. John Hunter
and Dr. Heberden. The friendly attention of the latter
is almost without intermission, and from j\Ir. Hunter's
skill it is hoped that ten days or a fortnight may restore
him to the practice of that science of which he is so dis-
tinguished an ornament."
A few days afterwards he is reported as still indisposed,
but able, nevertheless, to paint during his quiet interv^als
a beautiful little landscape. This landscape was among
those sold by Mrs. Gainsborough a year later.
At the end of INIay Gainsborough's condition had im-
proved sufflciently for him to bear removal from Pall
Mall to his house at Richmond, where the air at first did
him so much good that there seemed to be some chance
of his recovery. Unfortunately the improvement was
followed by a relapse ; the patient grew steadily worse,
and was at last carried back to Pall ^lall in a hopeless
state. That he himself regarded his condition as des-
perate is evident from a note of June 15th, in which,
however, the firmness of the writing shows that his
physical powers were as yet unexhausted :
" It is my strict charge that after my decease no plaster
cast, model, or likeness whatever be permitted to be
taken. But that if Mr. Sharp, who engraved Mr. Hunter's
print, should choose to make a print from the three-
quarter sketch which I intended for ]\Ir. Abel, painted
by myself, I give free consent.
"Tho. Gainsborough."
u
3o6 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
After the middle of June the newspapers were silent
about the health of Gainsborough,for it was now admitted
that his disease was cancer and that he was a doomed
man. We know little of what happened at Schomberg
House in the long summer days when he lay d}dng, but
his letters included one to Sherwin, written " from that
very chamber which afterwards became the chamber
of death," to praise the engraver's renderings of
Gainsborough's portraits of Lord Buckingham and
Lord Sandwich. His friend Kilderbee visited him and
heard from his lips expressions of regret about the
dissoluteness of his life. But Gainsborough added :
"They must take me altogether — liberal, thoughtless,
and dissipated." William Jackson of Exeter, for more
than twenty years his intimate acquaintance, tells us
that he lamented also that his life was finishing just as
he was commencing to do something, and to Jackson we
owe also the record of his last words, " We are all going
to Heaven, and Vandyke is of the party." There is a
popular beUef that Gainsborough uttered these words in
the presence of Reynolds on the occasion of that strange,
sad inteiview between the rivals, of which something
is revealed in Sir Joshua's Fourteenth Discourse. This
beUef originated with Allan Cunningham, who says in
his life of Gainsborough : "He sent for Reynolds and
peace was made between them. Gainsborough ex-
claimed to Sir Joshua, 'We are all going to Heaven,
and Vandyke is of the company,' and immediately
expired."
There is, however, no reason to beHeve that Sir Joshua
was present when Gainsborough expired at Schomberg
House at two o'clock in the morning of August 2nd,
1788. Reynolds, in the discourse delivered in December
of the same year, says that he was invited to " this last
interview " some days before Gainsborough died, and it
may be assumed that he lost no time in responding to
the appeal of the pathetic letter endorsed by him " From
LONDON, 1788 307
Gainsborough when dying," that is now in the possession
of the Royal Academy :
" Dear Sir Joshua,— I am just to write what I fear
you will not read — after lying in a dying state for 6
months. The extreme affection which I am informed of
by a Friend which Sir Joshua has expresd induces me to
beg a last favor, which is to come once under my Roof
and look at my things, my woodman you never saw, if
what I ask now is not disagreeable to your feeling that
I may have the honour to speak to you. I can from a
sincere Heart say that I always admired and sincerely
loved Sir Joshua Reynolds.
"Tho. Gainsborough."
Gainsborough, who in the weariness of a long drawn
out illness, had lost all count of time, was of course
mistaken in supposing that he had been dying for six
months, and in the original the figure 6 looks as if he
had hesitated over and altered it. His letter conveys
an idea of greater dejection than he really felt, for, on
the ist of August — the day before his death — he was
more hopeful than he had been in June. So far from
uttering his last words in Sir Joshua's presence he was
well enough to take an interest in his pictures and discuss
them with the President when he paid the historic visit
to Schomberg House. Gainsborough, on the occasion of
that visit, actually had many of his unfinished canvases
brought to his bedside to show to Sir Joshua, and
flattered himself that he might still live to complete them.
On Monday, August 4th, Bate broke his long silence
by announcing that the death of Gainsborough had taken
place at two o'clock on the morning of the preceding
Saturday ; and he accompanied his statement with a
touching obituary of the man in whom he saw nothing
but perfection, " one of the greatest geniuses that ever
adorned any age or any nation." No other newspaper
so far as I know, published an announcement on the 4th
of August, but on the 5th the Morning Post had a note on
3o8 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
Gainsborough, and the Morning Chronicle reprinted in
its entirety the article which had appeared in the Herald
the day before. The comments of the Morning Post
were friendly, but not too flattering upon the question of
Gainsborough's ability. " His talents as an artist were
of a very respectable kind, and certainly combined an
excellence in two different provinces of his art which the
same individual has seldom attained. . . . But, what-
ever his abilities as a painter, he was eminently distin-
guished for private virtues, and in the domestic and
convivial sphere, without deviating into weakness on the
one hand, or excess on the other, possessed the indis-
puted reputation of strong sensibility and original
humour." The Morning Chronicle followed up its reprint
of Bate's article on Gainsborough by a long and excellent
one of its own, written by someone who had knowTi the
painter. The articles in the Morning Herald and the
Morning Chronicle were, as I have explained in the preface,
the basis of the obituaries in the Gentleman's Magazine
and the European Magazine, to which all Gainsborough's
later biographers are indebted for much of their informa-
tion. It is curious that the Ipswich and Bath news-
papers published no notes of their own on Gainsborough's
death, but were content to reproduce a few paragraphs
from London journals.
The simplicity of Gainsborough's obsequies was the
subject of many comments by those who did not know
that the painter's funeral was unimposing because he
wished it to be so. Its arrangements were made in accord-
ance with the instructions contained in a document drawn
up by him a few weeks before his death. These arrange-
ments were made solely with a view to giving his family
as httle trouble as possible. He desired that he might
be privately buried in Kew Churchyard, near the grave
of his friend, Mr. Kirby ; that a stone without either
arms or ornament might be placed over him, inscribed
with his bare name, and containing space for the names
LONDON, 1788 309
of such of his family who, after death, might wish to
take up their abode with him ; that his funeral might
be as private as possible, and attended only by a few of
those friends he most respected.
In obedience to these injunctions, Gainsborough's
body was conveyed to Kew, attended by the chosen
mourners, on the Saturday following his death. At the
churchyard the six artists who had been invited to act
as pall-bearers walked in the following order :
Sir William Chambers Sir Joshua Reynolds.
Mr. Benjamin West. Mr. Bartolozzi.
Mr. Paul Sandby. Mr. Cotes.
Gainsborough Dupont, who followed as chief mourner,
was supported by Sheridan ; Linley, the musician (the
father of Mrs. Sheridan) ; John Hunter, the famous
surgeon, who had attended Gainsborough ; Jonathan
Buttall, the supposed original of The Blue Boy ; Mr.
Gossett, who was perhaps the modeller in wax whose
portrait Gainsborough showed in the Academy of 1780 ;
Mr. Trimmer, the son-in-law of Joshua Kirby, beside
whose tomb Gainsborough's grave had been dug ; and
Jeremiah Meyer, R.A., the miniature painter. Meyer,
who lived at Kew, died a few months after Gainsborough,
and was buried in a grave immediately adjoining that of
the painter, who lies between Meyer and Kirby. It is
stated that Sir WilHam Chambers and Benjamin West
came up from the country on purpose to attend the funeral,
and that ' ' Mr. Burke was to have been one of Mr. Gains-
borough's mourners, but for the circumstance of his being
at present so far from town."
Fulcher, in describing the closing scene of Gains-
borough's hfe, remarks on the fact that some of the con-
temporary accounts differ in their statements of the
reasons assigned for the artist's death ; and he quotes
a footnote to the obituary in the European Magazine in
which it is stated that " Mr. Gainsborough's disorder was
310 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
a wen, and not a cancer, as before erroneously stated,
which grew internally, and so large as to obstruct the
passages. This, it is said, his surgeons knew, but knew
at the same time it was fatal to cut it out." This note
was copied by the European Magazine from the General
Evening Post, a journal that is also the original authority
for the oft-quoted statement that Gainsborough had two
portraits of himself in his gallery, " \vhich, with a modesty
pecuhar to the painter, had their faces turned to the
wainscot."
There can, however, be no doubt that cancer was the
cause of Gainsborough's death. The accounts of Bate
and Thicknesse, both of whom were in close touch with
Gainsborough's family at the time, agree on this point ;
and there is stronger evidence in the shape of a letter
from the painter's niece, Mrs. Lane. This lady, who spent
part of her girlhood in Gainsborough's house, and is pre-
sumably the niece mentioned by Cunningham as assist-
ing to put flannel round her uncle's throat when he re-
turned from Westminster Hall, says that he died from
" cancer in the neck." The accounts of Bate and Thick-
nesse, while agreeing in attributing the death to cancer,
differ as to whether Gainsborough himself knew from
what he was suffering. Bate says that the knowledge was
kept from him, and that he died ignorant of the cause
of his complaint ; but, according to Thicknesse, he only
pretended to be ignorant, for the sake of his wife and
daughters, from whom he was careful to keep his suspicions
secret.
The will was proved on the 23rd of August. It is
executed on four sheets of paper, the first three of which
are signed, and the fourth signed and sealed by Gains-
borough. He names his wife and his elder daughter
Margaret executors of his will, and adds : "I earnestly
request my old friend and acquaintance, Mr. Samuel
Kilderbee of Ipswich, to act as overseer thereof, and to
advise and assist my said wife and daughter Margaret in
LONDON, 1788 311
the execution thereof, which request I trust he will comply
with out of our long and uninterrupted friendship which
has subsisted between us." In the will the first bequest
is one of five hundred pounds to Mrs. Gainsborough, who
is also to have all arrears of any annuity or annuities
that may be due at the time of her husband's death.
This bequest is followed by one to Gainsborough Dupont,
subject to conditions which suggest that the relations of
the uncle and nephew had not always been cordial.
Gainsborough leaves Dupont a hundred pounds in full
satisfaction and discharge of all claims or demands he
can or may have upon him. If, however, Dupont makes
any claim on the estate or effects in respect of work done
by him, or on any other account, the legacy of a hundred
pounds is revoked, and Mrs. Gainsborough is directed
to make a charge upon him for his board, washing, and
lodging, and the balance only of the hundred pounds shall
then be paid to him. Gainsborough recommends his
wife, to whom the contents of the houses in Pall Mall and
at Richmond are made over without reserve, to give to
Dupont " such of my models, implements, and utensils
in the painting business, oils, colours, varnishes, and such
like things as she may think useful to him," and to pro-
vide him and the two daughters with proper mourning.
Half of his monies and stock in the public funds
Gainsborough bequeaths to his daughter Margaret, and
the other half in trust to his wife and Margaret jointly,
to remain in the same securities at interest. The divi-
dends of the trust fund are to be applied at their discretion
for the maintenance of the younger daughter, Mary Fischer
(whose eccentricities were perhaps by this time sufficiently
developed to prove that she needed guardianship), and
in no case is Fischer to be allowed to interfere with her
money. It is to be " for her sole and separate use and
benefit, notwithstanding her coverture, and shall not be
subject to the debts, power, control, or intermeddling of
her present or any future husband."
312 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
I have been unable to discover at Somerset House
the value of Gainsborough's estate, but Mr. A. W.
Soward of the Estate Duty Office has kindly given me
some information which proves that the painter's family
was left better off than Bate and other of his friends
imagined. Gainsborough, as we have seen, bequeathed
to his wiie only five hundred pounds and his furniture
and pictures. The pictures sold badly, yet, according to
the Somerset House books, Mrs. Gainsborough left
property valued at " under £10,000," when she died in
1798. ]Much of this, no doubt, was accumulated secretly
in the lifetime of Gainsborough whose wife, according
to Fischer, was "receiver-general, paymaster-general and
auditor of her own accompts." Of her saving habits
evidence is given in a statement published more than
seventy years ago in the Art Union, on the authority of
" an old and valued friend of the Gainsborough family."
The friend declared that Gainsborough on his death-bed
was haunted by the fear that through his improvident life
his daughters would be left without sufficient provision :
" On this point his gentle wife soothed him by the
information that ' as he always threw his money about,
leaving it at the mercy of everyone, she had taken in
the course of twenty or thirty years as much as had
enabled her to save several thousand pounds. With that
and the sale of the Woodman and other pictures, doubtless
their children could subsist in comfort.' He thanked
her and blessed her warmly, saying that she had done per-
fectly right, that it was true that he sometimes thought
he had more bills than he found and had been puzzled
about it, but never suspected she had made free with what
now made his deathbed one of tranquillity and peace."
But in any case Gainsborough's daughters would not
have been left entirely without means, as his investments,
divided between them, must have amounted to more
than £8000. The official records show that Mrs. Fischer's
portion (held in trust) was ;^4,t5o, invested in 3 per cent.
Consolidated Bank Annuities.
LONDON, 1788 313
The painter's last resting-place was marked, as he
desired, by a plain stone bearing his name and age and the
date of interment. The same stone still covers him at
Kew, but the lettering — then nearly effaced — was recut
in 1865 at the expense of the late E. M. Ward, R.A., who
at the same time erected in the church a memorial tablet
to the artist. The simplicity of Gainsborough's grave
was remarked soon after his death by the correspondents of
several journals, who could not understand why so great
a man should lack a tomb, and the General Magazine
published some verses On Visiting the undccorated Grave
of Gainsborough, beginning
" O'er Gainsborough shall the green turf close
And not the sculptor's art aspire?
Shall Nature her own poet lose
And not be struck the poet's lyre ? "
It was as the painter of Nature, using the word in the
sense of pastoral scenes and landscapes, that Gains-
borough was eulogised by the minor poets in the autumn
of 1788. His portraits, which we now regard as his most
distinguished works, were almost disregarded by the
writers of elegies, of which the following, from the World,
is one of the best :
ELEGY ON THE DEATH OF MR GAINSBOROUGH
Mourn Painting, Mourn ! recline thy drooping head
And fling thy useless palette on the ground,
Gainsborough is numbered with the silent dead
And plaintive sighs from hills and dales resound.
His genius loved his country's native views,
Its taper spires, green lawns and sheltered farms ;
He touched each scene with Nature's genuine hues,
And gave the English landscape all its charms.
Who now shall paint mild evening's tranquil hour,
The cattle slow returning from the plain,
The glow of sultry noon, the transient shower,
The dark brown furrows rich with golden grain.
314 THO:\IAS GAINSBOROUGH
Bring fragrant violets, crimson poppies bring,
The cornflower glowing with celestial blue,
The yellow primrose, earliest child of spring,
Plucked from the fields which once his pencil drew.
In graceful wreaths entwine their rustic bloom,
That bloom which shames the gardens richest dyes.
And hang these votive garlands round the tomb
Where Nature's Painter, Nature's favourite, lies.
The distinction of being the last portrait painted by
Gainsborough has been claimed for several works, but it
belongs to a head of Gainsborough Dupont, who no
doubt sat when his uncle, though still able to work, was
too ill to admit to the studio anyone outside his own
household. Mrs. Lane, who owned this portrait, described
it as Gainsborough's last work, and said that it was
still on his easel when he died. It is probable that this
is the portrait of Dupont that was in the collection of the
late George Richmond, R.A., and described, when sold
at Christie's in 1897, as " the last work of the painter."
Sir W'ilham Richmond, however, does not know any-
thing of its history, except that Mr. George Richmond
bought it some time in the Fifties. This portrait is now
in the collection of Lord D'Abernon of Esher. The land-
scape already referred to as having been painted during
the last illness of Gainsborough was sold by his wife a year
after his death. A chronicler of 1789 says: "The
landscape which received his last touch has been pur-
chased by Mr. Tyrwhitt ; it is in a mixed style between
Gainsborough's manner and that of Poussin." Mr.
Tyrwhitt was a collector who owned several of Gains-
borough's works besides this last landscape.
A few days after the funeral some paragraphs appeared
stating that all Gainsborough's pictures, except those
already bespoken, were to be sold by auction, but these
statements proved to be unauthorised. Mrs. Gains-
borough was at this time aided by the friendly advice
of Sir Joshua Reynolds and Benjamin West, both capable
LONDON, 1788 315
men of business, who " professed a desire to serve her by
any interposition in their power," and she decided
not to sell any of her husband's pictures until the
following spring, when a plan for their disposal would be
proposed.
The announcement of her intention regarding the sale
was followed immediately by another concerning the
forgers of Gainsborough's drawings, who were already
endeavouring to dispose of works purporting to be from
his hand. On the authority of Mrs. Gainsborough, Bate
stated in the Morning Herald that there could not possibly
be a single genuine drawing in the hands of any of the
dealers. Gainsborough had made it a rule never to accept
money for his drawings, and the only ones he had parted
with had been bestowed as gifts upon particular friends
and " select persons of fashion." It was true that many
drawings by him were in existence, but they were in
the possession of his widow, and would be disposed of
with his other works.
It is difficult to accept without reservation Mrs. Gains-
borough's assertion that no drawings could be in the hands
of dealers because her husband had never sold any. Jack-
son says that he gave his drawings away recklessly, and
frequently to people who were ignorant of their value, and,
as his output was so large (Jackson believed that he had
seen at least a thousand drawings from his hand), it does
not seem possible that not one was in the market at the
time of the painter's death. Mrs. Gainsborough's an-
nouncement was perhaps called forth by some notes that
had appeared in the Morning Post. One of them, pub-
lished early in September, after praising Gainsborough's
drawings in almost extravagant terms, says that they were
being sought for with the utmost avidity. " Amongst
the most successful amateurs is Mr. Wigstead, who has
long possessed some of Gainsborough's most charming
efforts, and who has had luck enough to increase his col-
lection very largely since the death of that inimitable
3i6 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
artist." If Mrs. Gainsborough were right, Mr. Wigstead,
unless he had obtained gifts from her husband's friends,
could only have acquired forgeries in the few weeks that
had elapsed since the funeral at Kew.
In how impudent a fashion the imitators of Gains-
borough worked can be judged from another paragraph
of the same time, also published in the Morning Post:
" The slightest sketch from the pencil of the late Gains-
borough is now held in great value, and Burton, the actor,
whose talent in landscape painting is much respected, and
whose dexterity in imitating certain masters in that line
is greatly admired, has already been engaged to make
copies of many efforts of Gainsborough's beautiful and
simple taste. The diffusion of such models cannot be too
wide, as the art itself must derive improvement and advan-
tage from multiplying proofs of so chaste and elegant a
fancy."
This dexterous imitator of Gainsborough was John Burton,
an actor connected with Drury Lane, and an exhibitor
at the Royal Academy, where he was usually represented
by studies of moonlight effects. Gainsborough had
always objected to the copying of his landscapes on the
ground that "it affected the sale of new pictures." He
wrote thus to Ozias Humphry, R.A., who asked leave
to copy some of his works, and said that he had often
refused similar applications from his friends.
Although he appreciated Sir Joshua's kindness to Mrs.
Gainsborough, the editor of the Morning Herald had never
forgotten or forgiven the Academy's treatment of his dead
hero's portrait group of the Three Eldest Princesses, which
caused Gainsborough to withdraw his pictures from the
Exhibition of 1784. In the November following Gains-
borough's death an alleged irregularity in the election of
Fuseli to an Associateship gave Bate an opportunity of
attacking both the Royal Academy and its President.
He reminded them that when Gainsborough, " the greatest
ornament of your Academy," requested them a few years
LONDON, 1788 317
earlier to hang his portrait of the Princesses at the eleva-
tion at which it was intended to be placed at Carlton House,
his suit was rejected, because it was said to contravene
a standing rule which regulated the hanging of full-length
portraits, and that to depart from this rule would be a
dangerous precedent. This objection was deemed malig-
nant by many. They thought it impossible that the
Academy could have been inconvenienced by the hang-
ing of the picture of the illustrious ladies in question —
a picture painted for the heir-apparent — at the desired
height.
Mr. Gainsborough, continued Bate, made his request
because he was anxious that their Majesties might see the
portraits of three of their amiable offspring with the most
gratifying advantages of situation, and his claim was the
more strongly founded because he had painted the picture
in question in a tender style, to meet the eye at a trifling
elevation, and this at the particular request of the Prince.
"There were, however," said Bate, "those of you
who dreaded comparison with this artist, and who became
Romans on this occasion. ' Depart from the Academy
rules ! Impossible ! ' Mr. Gainsborough withdrew his
pictures in consequence, and they were seventeen in num-
ber besides the one already mentioned. If your refusal
bore at the time, which it did, the construction of being
malignant, that censure is established by some late pro-
ceedings. And it wall appear in the sequel that the laws
which you affect to revere are sometimes broken when a
petty purpose requires it. I need not remark that it is
an annual practice to leave a list open at the Academy
for a hmited time after the exhibition closes wherein the
artists who wish to become Associates may insert their
names. The fixed time was this year elapsed, and the
list shut when it occurred to Mr. Fuseh to put in his claim
for this scarce-desirable honour. But the Book of Graphic
Destiny, the Institute of Academical Dignity, was shut
for the year, and what was to be done ? Mr. Fuseli
knew well. He knocked at the President's door, and
made his request known. A deaf ear was not turned to
his demand — Fuseh's branch of the art interferes not with
3i8 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
Sir Joshua — he is not a Gainsborough ! ' Pshaw,* said
the President, ' never heed the rules. I'll take care of your
name . ' Accordingly the printed list appeared with Fuseli ' s
name, to the astonishment of all the brethren."
Fuseh, it should be remarked, at this time cared as
little for the Academy as Gainsborough had done, and he
became a candidate for Associateship for prudential rather
than artistic reasons. Disapproving of associated bodies
for teaching the fine arts, he had declined membership of
some foreign Academies, and, until the autumn of 1788,
had refused to put his name down at the Royal Academy,
although urged to do so by Sir Joshua himself. But, in
the preceding June, he had married Miss Rawlins, of
Batheaston, and, being far from opulent, " the considera-
tion of the pension annually granted by the Royal Academy
under such circumstances to the widows of the members,
overcame his reluctance." He was elected an Associate
in November, 1788, and was expected to succeed to the
seat left vacant among the Forty by Gainsborough's death.
However, he was defeated by Hamilton, who was chosen
to fill Gainsborough's place in the following February.
CHAPTER XVII
THE SALE AT SCHOMBERG HOUSE
Gainsborough's Old Masters — The Queen and his drawings— His gifts
to Sheridan — Five guineas for a Michael Angelo — Copies by
Gainsborough — Bate's advertisement of the sale — Lord Gains-
borough buys The Woodman — The landscapes — The Duke of
Newcastle's purchase — The Duchess of Devonshire — The Queen
visits Schomberg House — Buys more drawings and two pictures
— Other royal visitors — The Royal Academy offers to buy a
picture — The French Ambassador — Sale of Gainsborough's
Murillo — Its present possessor — The last day — Seven hundred
visitors — Results of the sale — The unlucky Woodman — The fire at
Exton — Gainsborough's landscapes and their sale — A mistaken
idea — More forgers.
In the winter of 1788-9 Mrs. Gainsborough and her
nephew, Gainsborough Dupont, arranged at Schomberg
House the drawings and the unsold finished paintings by
the dead artist, and placed among them on the walls
the pictures by Old Masters which he had collected.
Early in the spring it was announced that preparations
were being made for the disposal of all the pictures Gains-
borough had been possessed of, including The Woodman
and The Peasant Smoking at his Cottage Door, and a large
number of drawings ; and that they would be exhibited
" in the very rooms where his animated pencil gave them
creation." The King, perhaps, might choose a picture
or two, or the Prince of Wales, but except to those great
personages, Mrs. Gainsborough would not be prevailed
upon to dispose of a single work before the whole col-
lection was open to public view.
It was stated that the pictures by Old Masters to be
sold, although not numerous were well chosen, and such
a conclusion would be readily made when it was recollected
that the works of this description were those which Mr.
319
320 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
Gainsborough had selected and retained in the course of
his anxious pursuits after the beauties of the arts. There
were many drawings, but if they were multipHed by fifty
there was taste enough in the country to cover them all,
and, according to Bate, the approaching sale would afford
the first opportunity of acquiring by purchase any of
these slight but charming examples from the hand of
a master who in his lifetime never could be prevailed
upon to part with one for money. To this announce-
ment the editor of the Morning Herald added some
valuable notes upon Gainsborough's drawings. Refer-
ring to six of these works that were to be included in
the sale, he remarked that they were in coloured chalks
and formed part of a set of twelve executed by the artist
some years earlier. Lord Mulgrave had then seen this
set of drawings, and admired them so much that he offered
a hundred guineas for them for the purpose of present-
ing them to the Queen. Gainsborough, steadfast in his
purpose never to sell a drawing, refused the offer, but
asked Lord Mulgrave to choose four of the set and to
beg the Queen's acceptance of them in the name of the
artist.
Eight or ten drawings were in the possession of the
Duchess of ^Marlborough ; several belonged to Colonel
Hamilton (whose violin playing had charmed Gains-
borough into giving him a picture), and Mr. Sheridan
was the owner of twelve of those beautiful sketches " by
the most animating painter who ever described rustic
nature, who, to the majesty of Rubens and the air of
Claude, united the truth of \\"ynants and the simplicity
of Ruysdael." "Mr. Sheridan," said the wTiter in
conclusion, '' prizes these reliques \rith that fraternal
attachment which genius bestows upon all her sons."
And Sheridan, though usually in a position more or less
impecunious, appears to have presen,'ed these drawings
from his creditors for a great many years, for some of them
were still hanging in his wife's dressing-room in 1806.
SALE AT SCHOMBERG HOUSE 321
On the 24th of March Mrs. Gainsborough announced
that the exhibition and sale of her late husband's pictures
would commence on the 30th of the same month at
Schomberg House, and would be continued every day
except Sundays until further notice. The pictures would
be on view from ten in the morning until six at night,
half a crown would be charged for admission, and Mr.
Gainsborough Dupont would be in attendance to dispose
of the exhibits by private contract. It was expressly
stated that no pictures would be mentioned in the cata-
logue except those actually in the possession of Mr.
Gainsborough at the time of his death, including the
before-mentioned Old Masters, which he had collected
" with great attention."
Gainsborough, although a fine painter, was perhaps
not a good judge of pictures, for the prices attached to
many of the fifty Old Masters that he had purchased
from time to time suggest that the authenticity of the
canvases was more than questionable. Of three portraits
of ladies by Vandyke, the painter whom he admired
above all others, one certainly was marked at eighty
guineas, but the others were offered at fifteen guineas
each. A portrait by Rubens, said to represent the wife
of that master, was sold for ten guineas ; a man's
portrait by Velasquez for fifteen ; two portraits of ladies
by Sir Peter Lely for twenty guineas each ; and a Fruit
Piece by Michael Angelo for twenty guineas. Another
Michael Angelo, Angel appearing to the Virgin Mary,
failed to find a purchaser at five guineas. Most of the
remaining Old Masters in Gainsborough's collection were
offered at prices ranging from two to forty guineas, and
only one was marked above a hundred. This was the St.
John of Murillo, the picture brought from Spain some years
before by Cumberland and purchased by Gainsborough
from his friend the dealer Desenfans. The price asked
for the Murillo was three hundred guineas.
On the other hand, if Old Masters were cheap at
X
322 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
Schomberg House, comparatively large sums were asked
for copies of their works by Gainsborough. A hundred
and fifty guineas was demanded for his copy of the well-
known Vandyke, The Pembroke Family, painted from
memory on a canvas about three feet by four ; and a
hundred guineas for the copy of the painting by Vandyke
of Lord John and Lord Bernard Stuart. The last men-
tioned of these copies by Gainsborough was shown at
the spring exhibition of the Whitechapel Art Gallery in
1908, together with several other works of a similar nature
from his hand. Among the remaining copies included
in the sale were those of Lord Grantham's Velasquez,
The Conspirators, and of the portrait by Vandyke at
Holkham of the Due dArcmberg, for which Gainsborough's
unfinished portrait of the Prince of Wales had been
designed as a pendant.
Among the forty landscapes on the walls, varying in
price from ten to five hundred guineas, were two not
marked for sale. These were the pictures painted three
or four years earlier for the Prince of Wales. They had
remained in the artist's possession, and were hung in the
exhibition with the sanction and approval of the Prince.
The subject -pictures by Gainsborough included The
Woodman, the Boy at a Cottage Fire and Girl Eating
Milk, the Boy with a Cat, the Representation of St.
James's Park with Drest Figures, and the Beggar Boys.
A prominent and unexpected object in the exhibition was
the oval portrait group of the Duke and Duchess of Cum-
berland, shown walking in a garden with Lady Ehzabeth
Luttrell, the Duchess's sister, seated in the background.
The portrait was priced at a hundred guineas. The
drawings, a hundred and forty-eight in number, were
offered at from two to ten guineas each.
A few privileged persons were allowed to see the exhibi-
tion a day or two before it was opened to the public, and
among these was the Duke of York, who, accompanied
by Sheridan, paid a long visit to Schomberg House on
SALE AT SCHOMBERG HOUSE 323
Saturday, March 28th. On the following Monday the
pictures were on view, and Bate, anxious to do all in his
power to help the widow and daughters of his friend, re-
printed in the Morning Herald of that day the advertise-
ment of the 24th of March, not in the ordinary fashion,
but in italics, and in the middle of the news page. He
accompanied this with an announcement to the effect
that Mrs. Gainsborough had been solicited to sell certain
pictures and drawings, but had refused to part with one
until they were all offered to the general view, or to suffer
them to be exposed in any rooms but those in which they
were painted.
The centre of attraction at the exhibition was The
Woodman. For some days before the pictures were on
view rumours were again in circulation that the King
intended to add the picture to his collection, and that
nothing but " a well-known calamity," by which was
meant His Majesty's mental breakdown in the preceding
autumn, had prevented him from acquiring it earlier.
However, the King did not purchase The Woodman, which
was secured by Lord Gainsborough for five hundred
guineas on the first day of the sale. Another picture,
hanging in the upper room, A Peasant Smoking at a
Cottage Door with his Family, described as the last land-
scape of any magnitude painted by Gainsborough, was
the theme of general admiration. It had been painted as
a companion to the autumnal scene for which Sir Peter
Burrell had lately given three hundred and fifty guineas—
The Market Cart, now in the National Gallery. Contem-
porary opinion ranked it as richer in painting and effect
than Sir Peter's picture, and as possessing merit beyond
all works of the kind produced by Gainsborough. But
this picture of the peasant at his door, " the finest land-
scape ever produced, with its rich scenery of a summer
evening unsurpassed by the fervid glow of Claude," al-
though praised by everybody, found no buyer, perhaps
because its price of five hundred guineas was thought too
324 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
high. I have been unable to trace the present owner of
A Peasant Smoking at a Cottage Door, but a picture of
exactly the same size {75 x 61 inches) of a peasant family
outside a cottage was lent by Sir George Beaumont in
1885 to the Gainsborough exhibition at the Grosvenor
Gallery.
All the comments that appeared on the exhibition
show that Gainsborough was regarded by most people at
that time, as he chose to regard himself — as a painter of
pastoral and landscape subjects who had practised por-
traiture for the sake of making a living. His achievements
in portraiture are rarely mentioned, while his landscapes
and his pastoral subjects, such as the Boy at a Cottage
Fire and a Girl Eating Milk, and the Boy with a Cat,
are praised in extravagant terms. " The cat alone," says
one critic, " is a better warrant for immortality than could
be produced by groups of Academicians who amuse the
caprices of a vicious taste. Every landscape, too, having
animals or groups of rustic figures, discovers the peculiar
and superlative genius of the man ; it is astonishing that
he did not cultivate this and neglect every other pursuit."
Nevertheless, the pictures of the boy and girl at the fire,
and the boy with the cat, remained unsold, while the land-
scapes sold fairly well. Several of the larger ones, includ-
ing the " evening scene of a cottage near some water,"
and the majority of the smaller ones, were sold in the first
three days. The large work referred to was probably
No. 78, Landscape with a Cottage and Figures, the price
of which was a hundred and fifty guineas. Lady Hoare
bought, for a hundred guineas, the picture with the figures
of two woodmen loading a donkey, and other purchasers
of landscapes in the earlier stages of the exhibition were
Lord Darnley, Lord Duncannon, Mr. Knight, Mr. George
Hardinge, Mrs. Child, Colonel Fitzpatrick, and Sir George
Beaumont,
The notes written on the landscapes by Bate and others
are of great interest, and would be more so if it were pos-
SALE AT SCHOMBERG HOUSE 325
sible always to identify the works described. The writers
doubtless obtained their information from Gainsborough
Dupont, who was in the rooms all day, receiving the visitors
and endeavouring to sell his uncle's pictures. We learn
that the Prince of Wales's landscape, No. 75, a study of
an upland and valley, with sheep, water, trees, and broken
ground, was painted on Gainsborough's return from his
visit to the Lakes in the autumn of 1783, the visit made in
the society of his lifelong friend, Samuel Kilderbee of
Ipswich.
This picture, which was included in the first exhibition
at Schomberg House, in 1784, though not a portrait of
any particular spot, is described as highly characteristic of
the scenery of the Lake country visited by Gainsborough.
Another landscape, No. 52, was painted after a tour in
Wales, and one critic declared that not only had the
wild scenery been transferred to the canvas with due
attention to its grace and charm, but that the picture
had " such evident marks of locaUty that whoever has
been west of the Severn will be struck with this mimic
scene." One of the purchasers of landscapes at the close
of the first week was Lord Gower, afterwards created Duke
of Sutherland, who bought No. 72 for a hundred and twenty
guineas. The picture, described as a composition of wild
and rugged country, is perhaps the mountain landscape
with rocks and streams now in the collection of the present
Duke of Sutherland, and reproduced in Lord Ronald
Gower's book on Gainsborough.
Wales probably inspired Lord Gower's picture, and
the Landscape with Sheep and Figures, " a beautiful scene
of an Alpine solitude," which was hanging at the end of
the upper room at Schomberg House, close to the large
picture of A Peasant Smoking at a Cottage Door with
his Family. A picture much admired by the critics of
the day, although it failed to find a purchaser, was No. 64,
Landscape with Cows and Horses. This work, praised
generally for its fine breadth and airiness, and the colour
326 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
of the animals, was moved after the first week to a better
position nearer the Hght.
Throughout April the exhibition at Schomberg House
attracted numerous visitors in spite of the half-crown
charged for admission, and the pictures continued to sell,
though not so readily as the widow and her friends had
hoped. In the middle of the month the Duke of
Newcastle bought for eighty guineas the Beggar Boys,
a picture which Gainsborough had painted five years
earlier, using as a model the lad who had sat for the
figure of A Shepherd exhibited in the Academy of 1781.
At this period, it is interesting to know, a frequent
visitor to the exhibition was a great lady whose name is
inseparably connected in the public mind with that of
Gainsborough, and with the mystery that surrounds the
canvas known as " The Stolen Duchess." " It is not a
Httle flattering," says Bate, " to the memory of Mr,
Gainsborough that his pictures and drawings have been
repeatedly visited by the Duchess of Devonshire, whose
elegance of taste in the Fine Arts is equal to her politeness
of manners and accomplishment of person."
But a more important personage than the Duchess
of Devonshire was soon to visit the exhibition. On the
i8th of April the Morning Herald, in a notice headed with
the largest capitals, announced that on the previous day
the Queen, accompanied by the Princess Royal, Princess
Augusta, and Princess EHzabeth — the three " Eldest
Princesses " who figured in the portrait group withdrawn
from the Academy in 1784 — ^had driven from Bucking-
ham House to Pall Mall unattended by guards, and
alighted at Gainsborough's house. The Royal party,
whose visit " operated to suspend for a time the resort
of gay carriages to the rooms," was received by Lord
Ailesbury and a lady-in-waiting who had been sent in
advance to prepare for their arrival, and remained for
an hour and a half examining the pictures. They were
interested most in The Woodman and A Boy at a
SALE AT SCHOMBERG HOUSE 327
Cottage Fire, both of which had been seen and admired
by the King at Buckingham House early in the previous
year, and in Gainsborough's drawings, of which the Queen
bought six. These were part of the series in coloured
chalk, of which her Majesty already owned four that were
the gift of the artist himself. The twelve drawings com-
prised in this series are said by Bate to have been the
only works in coloured chalks finished by Gainsborough.
The Princess Royal, who admired his drawings and
possessed some artistic skill, afterwards made copies of
several of those acquired by the Queen. Other dis-
tinguished visitors at this time were Prince William
Henry (afterwards William the Fourth) and Princess
Sophia ; and the Duchess of Gloucester, a frequent sitter
to Gainsborough and the original of one of his most
charming portraits.
The Queen bought two pictures from the exhibition
in addition to the drawings mentioned above, but their
titles have not been recorded. It is not unhkely that
one of them was the oval portrait group of the Duke
and Duchess of Cumberland and Lady Elizabeth Luttrell,
the presence of which in the rooms had been the cause of
a great deal of gossip. Three or four days before the
Queen's visit a writer in one of the newspapers concluded
a favourable criticism of the group by saying : "It is
extraordinary why this picture is not purchased by some
of the Duchess's family, and still more surprising that it
should be offered for sale when it was painted at the
Duke's instance." If not purchased by the Queen on
the occasion of her visit to the exhibition, the Cumberland
group was no doubt bought soon afterwards by some one
in the interests of the Court. Had it not been disposed
of during the sale the Royal Academy would have
purchased it, for at a meeting of the Council, held in May,
it was resolved : " That when Mrs. Gainsborough's ex-
hibition is over fifty guineas be offered for Mr. Gains-
borough's picture of their Royal Highnesses the Duke
328 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
and Duchess of Cumberland." It has been said that the
garden shown in this picture was at Kew, but according
to a contemporary note it represents some place in the
grounds of the Duke's Lodge at Windsor, where the
picture was painted. It was lent by Queen Victoria to
the Winter Exhibition of the Royal Academy in 1895.
At the end of April Mrs. Gainsborough decided to
reduce the charge for admission to the exhibition from
half a crown to a shilling, professedly " with a view to
accommodate the admirers of Mr. Gainsborough's genius
in a way as extensive as possible," but more likely because
the attendance at the higher price showed signs of falling
off. The Morning Herald announced the change in
another advertisement printed in italics and placed in
the midst of the news paragraphs, and more visitors than
ever flocked to Pall Mall, whither, on the 28th of April,
the French Ambassador escorted a party of distinguished
foreigners to see the work of the great English painter.
More pictures were sold in the second period of the ex-
hibition, and among them the most highly priced of the
Old Masters, the St. John of Murillo, which Sir Peter
Burrell bought for the amount at which it was offered —
three hundred guineas. This was the picture for which
Gainsborough had paid Desenfans five hundred guineas
two years earlier. I have been able, fortunately, to
trace the subsequent history of the Murillo so much ad-
mired by Gainsborough, and for which he paid what was
then regarded as a very large price. It is now in the col-
lection formed by the late Dr. Ludwig Mond, and in part
bequeathed (subject to the life interest of Mrs. Mond)
to the National Gallery. By the terms of Dr. Mond's
will the Trustees are allowed, with certain limitations,
to choose pictures from the collection, and it is probable,
therefore, that at some future time Gainsborough's
Murillo will hang in Trafalgar Square.
The large sketch of A Foxhunt in the exhibition at
Schomberg House, on a canvas about eight feet by six,
ST. JOHN IN THE WILDERNESS
(Gainsborough's Murillo)
By permission of Mrs. Litdwig Mend
SALE AT SCHOMBERG HOUSE 329
was bought by Sir John Leicester (afterwards Lord de
Tabley) for thirty guineas. It is not unlikely that A
Foxhunt is the picture of the same title, now in the
possession of Lord Rosebery. Several other works were
sold for small prices from the Gainsborough collection,
but A Boy at a Cottage Fire and a Girl Eating Milk,
marked at four hundred guineas, and the Boy with a Cat
at two hundred and fifty remained unsold, although both
had been universally admired. Stranger still, there was
no buyer for the beautiful picture of the promenaders
in the Mall, described in the catalogue as A Representa-
tion oj St. James's Park with Brest Figures, the price of
which was only two hundred guineas.
The Gainsborough exhibition remained open until
the end of May, and no fewer than seven hundred
visitors, " persons of distinction," paid their shillings at
Schomberg House on the last day. The close of the ex-
hibition was preceded by an announcement respectfully
informing the public that, after the 31st of the month, no
access could possibly be permitted to the rooms, and re-
questing purchasers to take away their pictures within
ten days under penalty of forfeiting the deposit money,
according to the conditions of the sale. The result of
the exhibition could not have been gratifying to Mrs.
Gainsborough or to Bate, who, for the sake of his old
friend, had done so much to help and advertise it in the
columns of the Morning Herald. The larger portion of
the pictures, old and new, worth at catalogue prices
between seven and eight thousand pounds, remained on
Mrs. Gainsborough's hands, and not more than a quarter
of the drawings had been disposed of. Most of the unsold
works were reserved for the sale which Mr. Christie
conducted at Gainsborough's house three years later,
and the sold ones sent to the various collectors by whom
they had been acquired.
Among these last-mentioned works was Gains-
borough's favourite picture. The Woodman, which, as I
330 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
have already mentioned, was bought by the Earl of
Gainsborough on the first day of the exhibition. It is
the picture referred to in the life of Nollekens by J. T.
Smith, who knew Gainsborough and visited at his house.
Smith declares that the " excellent picture of The Wood-
man stood for years unsold against the wall, and though
the sum asked for it was only one hundred guineas, it
remained in Gainsborough's room until after his death,
when Lord Gainsborough purchased it for five hundred
guineas, the sum the artist's widow thought proper to
put upon it." This statement has been accepted by
Cunningham and Fulcher and some of the biographers
who succeeded them, but it is manifestly incorrect in cer-
tain important particulars. Smith was writing of events
that occurred forty years before the date of his book,
and his memory played him false. The Woodman could
not have stood for years unsold in Gainsborough's studio,
because it was one of the last completed of his important
works, and was only commenced in the summer of 1787.
Nor is it in the remotest degree probable that it was ever
offered for sale for a hundred guineas or anything ap-
proaching that sum. The Woodman, painted at a time
when Gainsborough's works were selling freely and for
large sums, was from the first regarded as a notable
picture, and was talked about from the time it was sent
to Buckingham House for the King's inspection early
in January 1788. Desenfans offered four hundred
guineas for The Woodman, an offer that was refused by
the artist, who always attached a high value to this work,
and had reason to think the King might buy it. He
knew, too, that it was hankered after by Lord Gains-
borough, the ultimate possessor of the canvas.
The Woodman was an unlucky picture, as most people
know, but one of its misfortunes has escaped the notice
of modern writers. It was sent to Lord Gainsborough's
house after the close of the exhibition in Pall Mall, and
a few months later was despatched by its new owner to
SALE AT SCHOMBERG HOUSE 331
his seat, Exton Park, Oakham. Soon afterwards it was
announced that " this glorious picture in removing to
Lord Gainsborough's seat has been spoilt. A knot in
the packing-case has rubbed a hole in the canvas, and a
bottle of strong varnish, sent carelessly in the case,
broke, and has damaged the picture still more." How-
ever, Bate found out from Gainsborough Dupont, to
whom the repairs were entrusted, that the damage was
less serious than had been reported. The bottle of
varnish which was broken in the packing-case had
caused a sheet, placed over the picture for security, to
adhere to some portions of the painting. The adhesion
was reduced by spirits of turpentine, and all that Dupont
had to do was to effect " a timely prevention of corrosive
consequences, and to restore a coat of Gainsborough's
exquisite transparent varnish — an art in itself — to pre-
serve the colours from change." The secret of Gains-
borough's " exquisite transparent varnish " has not been
handed down to us, but, according to his friend Jackson,
he was too fond of varnish in the concluding portion of
his career, and the stability of his work suffered in
consequence.
'The Earl of Gainsborough died in 1798, leaving no
successor to the title ; and all his property, including
Exton and the pictures contained in the house, descended
to his nephew, Mr. Gerard Noel Edwards, who thereupon
assumed the family surname of Noel. In May 1810
Mr. Noel had his works of art examined and put in order
where necessary by a picture cleaner and restorer named
Hill, who completed his work and left Exton Park on the
evening of the 22nd. At five o'clock on the morning of
the 23rd the eastern end of the ancient house was dis-
covered to be on fire, and before assistance could be
obtained the entire wing with its contents had been des-
troyed. It is said that nothing was saved from any of
the burnt rooms except a sum of £2000 in bank-notes
which Mr. Noel had in his bedroom. The pictures
332 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
destroyed included works by Titian, Rubens, Teniers,
Salvator Rosa, and other foreign masters, and several
paintings by Gainsborough, in addition to The Woodman.
Among these were the well-known Cottage Children with
the Ass, two fine landscapes, and a picture described as
The Fisher Boy, which I have been unable to identify.
Mr. Noel suffered a loss of £20,000, of which only a quarter
was covered by insurance.
The story of Gainsborough's supposed inability to find
a purchaser for The Woodman, even at so small a
price as a hundred guineas, is matched by the statement
concerning the hundreds of unsold landscapes that are
said to have been stacked at the time of his death on either
side of the passages at Schomberg House. As a matter
of fact, his remaining landscapes, shown in the exhibition,
numbered, as already stated, less than forty all told.
Two of these were sold works, belonging to the Prince of
Wales, and nearly half of the remainder were small studies,
some of them only a few inches square. It may have
been difficult to dispose of landscapes at Ips\\ich and
Bath, but they appear to have sold fairly well in the last
years in Pall Mall. Among the many inaccurate state-
ments about Gainsborough's landscapes, one may be
mentioned concerning The Market Cart. William Sandby,
in his sketch of Gainsborough's hfe in his History of the
Royal Academy of Arts, says that Gainsborough received
only twenty guineas for this picture, which, as we have
seen, was sold almost at once and for a high price to Sir Peter
Burrell. Bate, in a paragraph on the death of the fourth
Duke of Rutland in 1787, mentions that the pictures upon
which he had not long before spent £16,000 included three
landscapes by Gainsborough, and the cost of the three is
given as £220 in an undated list in the Duke's writing,
preserved at Belvoir, and entitled " Pictures and Statues
that I have collected." At auction, too, Gainsborough's
landscapes seem to have fetched fair prices in his life-time,
as in the case of the two small works in the collection of
SALE AT SCHOMBERG HOUSE 333
Sir Joshua's master, Hudson ; and the Cornard Wood
picture for which Boydell paid seventy-five guineas in
the spring of 1788.
The newspapers of 1789 make it clear that Mrs. Gains-
borough's object in showing her husband's pictures in
the rooms in which they were produced, and in refusing
to part with any of them before the exhibition was opened,
was to checkmate the forgers who were now more busy
than ever. A writer who prophesies that the time is not
far distant when a Gainsborough landscape will be sought
for as eagerly as one from the brush of Claude or Rubens,
says of the pictures then at Schomberg House : " They
are shown in the very rooms in which they were painted,
and it is a pleasing reflection to a collector that he is able
to select a picture with a confidence of its being a genuine
work untouched and unimitated ; so that no vile copy
can in future strike him with surprise, and diminish from
the value and scarcity of the work he possesses." The
same note is struck by the Morning Post, which agrees that
" it has been very properly observed on the pictures of
Mr. Gainsborough, that they should not be suffered to
leave the rooms where his exquisite pencil gave them
existence, till they are sold. A collector, thus convinced
that no tampering brush has violated the touch of the
great master, will select in security."
Bate, who in the Morning Herald, two or three months
after Gainsborough's death, had warned the pubhc against
purchasing drawings which purported to come from his
hand, now spoke more plainly about forgers. After the
close of the Schomberg House exhibition, he published
an article on the subject, couched in the strongest terms.
" WTien," he said, " a genius of first-rate merit departs,
with what posthumous rubbish is he instantly encumbered,
to answer the catchpenny views of literary fabrications !
So fares it in the graphic branch as much as in letters,
and such is the fate of the charming Gainsborough, Since
his death, scarce a sale of pictures has occurred in which
334 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
some wretched imitations of his fine work have not been
introduced. An execrable impostor of the brush who
resides at Bath has been labouring for some months past
to impose on the taste of the public by pictures and draw-
ings in the Master's style ; and two others in different
parts of the kingdom are employed in the like ungenerous
manner, which, in the end, they will find most unprofitable.
Two pictures under the description just mentioned were
last week sent to Mr. Greenwood, and we beUeve they are
intended for sale this day. The eye of that gentleman is
too correct to be imposed upon, and his integrity is too
established to allow the deceptions in question to pass as
genuine works. It is well that they fell into hands too
respectable to continue the deceit, and we pledge ourselves
to be vigilant in exposing such contemptible artifices
whenever they are attempted."
Mr. Greenwood was the auctioneer-artist who sold the
Cornard Wood landscape to Boydell, and the sale at which
the forged Gainsboroughs were announced to make their
appearance was one of pictures " the property of a Man
of Fashion," held on the nth of June 1789.
CHAPTER XVIII
GAINSBOROUGH DUPONT
New light on Dupont's career — Articled to his uncle — A student at
the Royal Academy — Thicknesse again — A blackmailer — Bate's
opinion of him — Dupont as Gainsborough's successor — The King
and the Prime Minister befriend him — Dupont exhibits a por-
trait of Gainsborough at the Academy — Badly hung — Dupont
said to have married his cousin — Mrs. Gainsborough leaves
Schomberg House — Another sale — Bate the chief buyer — Dupont
an unsuccessful candidate for the A.R.A. — His work at Trinity
House — His death — Sale of Gainsborough's unfinished works —
Extraordinary prices — The Musidora and The Housemaid — Thirteen
shillings for three portraits — Death of Mrs. Gainsborough — Sale
of her husband's personal effects — " A blunderbuss, a set of
tools " — Hoppner buys his lute — Deaths of Mary and Margaret.
Mrs. Gainsborough lived at the house in Pall Mall for
three years after the sale of June 1789, and with her re-
mained her nephew, who cherished hopes of succeeding
to his uncle's connection as a portrait painter. Gains-
borough Dupont was a man of a retiring disposition, of
whose career the existing books of artistic biography tell
us practically nothing, except that he was his uncle's
assistant for many years, and that he painted a large
group of portraits for the Court Room at Trinity House.
His name is given as Dupont in all the contemporary
records with which I am acquainted, but Seguier, in his
Dictionary of Painters, says he believes that " Dupon "
is its proper form, and it is written as " Du Pont " by
Gainsborough's niece, Mrs. Lane, in a letter to Allan
Cunningham. It suggests, of course, a French origin,
and in the newspaper criticisms of his work at the Royal
Academy the artist is more than once mentioned as
" Monsieur Dupont," but at Sudbury, where he was born,
335
336 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
the name has been famiUar for many generations. At
the chapel in Friars Street, which has succeeded the
meeting-house in which Gainsborough was baptized, a
font may be seen that was erected twenty yeais ago by
the children of Alfred and Mary Dupont, who had wor-
shipped in the chapel for more than half a century. The
name of Dupont is still displayed over a shop in Gains-
borough Street, not far from the great painter's birthplace.
Dupont, who was the son of Gainsborough's sister
Sarah, owed his artistic education almost entirely to his
uncle, to whom, as his indentures show, he was apprenticed,
on the I2th of January 1772, to learn " The Art or Mystery
of a Painter." When looking through the minutes of
the Council of the Royal Academy, I discovered a curious
fact about Gainsborough Dupont 's training in art. He
was a student in the schools of the Royal Academy, and
was admitted in 1775, on the same day as John Hoppner.
It is strange that Gainsborough, who in 1775 was on the
worst of terms with the Academy, should have allowed
his nephew and apprentice to work in the schools at Somer-
set House, Dupont, when apprenticed, was a boy of seven-
teen, but he appears to have lived in Gainsborough's
house from an early period. Bate, who always showed
a friendly interest in Dupont, says that he was with Gains-
borough from his infancy ; and Thicknesse, who knew the
young painter in his Bath days, speaks of him as having
been "fostered under his uncle's wing from a child."
Both men encouraged Dupont to remain at Schomberg
House, and to endeavour to take his uncle's place in the
world of art. Bate supported this idea consistently in
the Morning Herald ; and Thicknesse said that he would
venture to pronounce Dupont " a man of exquisite genius,
little inferior in the Hne of a painter to his uncle. I hope
and believe that, if his own diffidence and modesty does
not prevent him, he will not remove from his late uncle's
house, for I am sure he can support its former credit, either
as a landscape or a portrait painter."
GAINSBOROUGH DUPOXT 337
This was written in Thicknesse's sketch of the hfe of
Gainsborough, pubUshed not long after the painter's
death, but the portion of the page on which it is printed is
missing in some copies. It was torn off by Thicknesse
himself, who quarrelled with Dupont before all the edition
was disposed of. The cause of the quarrel was a letter
written by Thicknesse to Mrs. Gainsborough, in which
he threatened to attack not only her reputation, but that
of her late husband — the man whose fine qualities he had
just been praising in print ! The letter, said to have
been " couched in such execrable terms as would be deemed
unpardonable from a drayman, to the most abandoned
of women," Was properly resented by Dupont, who warned
Thicknesse that as his uncle — ^the natural guardian of the
family — was no more, he himself would be his aunt's
champion.
Philip Thicknesse, however reputable a person he may
have been in earlier life, had descended to a very low level
at the time Dupont defended Mrs. Gainsborough from his
attacks. He appears to have become a systematic black-
mailer, and practically admits as much in his Memoirs and
Anecdotes. " My friends," he says, " eat my beef, drink
m}'' port, and help to spend that which my enemies supply
me with. It is for this reason that I treat them, poor
devils, with tenderness. I should be sorry to do them
quite up, for I know not what I should have done to make
both ends meet in my old age if it had not been for the
repeated kindness of my enemies ... I can at any time
muster ten or a dozen knaves or fools who will put a hun-
dred pounds or two into my pocket merely for holding
them up to public scorn." A contemporary reviewer of
the Memoirs and Anecdotes pointed out that this was no
new mode of picking up a livelihood, as editors of daily
papers had been pubhcly charged not only with receiving
payment for holding people up to ridicule, but with taking
hush-money, and he hinted that hush-money was not
altogether unconnected with the methods of Mr. Thicknesse.
338 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
There were many who feared him and his possible
revelations, but these, fortunately, did not include the
editor of the Morning Herald. Bate feared no one, and,
in spite of the harshness of the law of libel of that time,
did not hesitate in his journal to warn the public against
a man whom he regarded as a scoundrel. " There are
persons," said he, " who should be indicated as pests of
society. Wherever they go, they announce their power
of doing mischief, and lay under contribution female
timidity and vicious cowardice. A hoary offender of
this description has long escaped the cudgel of resentment
and the sword of exasperated rage. He has menaced
public men into hberal contributions, and has held numer-
ous famihes in apprehension and terror. It will not be
necessary to put P. T. under this infamous but faithful
picture."
Thicknesse's last words on the quarrel with Dupont
are contained in a malicious letter to Gainsborough's
sister, Mrs. Gibbon. He complains bitterly of the action
of her nephew, of whom, he said, he had hitherto thought
highly. " But," adds Thicknesse, " Mrs. Gainsborough
always told me that Dupont was a drunken, worthless
fellow, and that I did not know him. ... I have
indeed learnt since I came to town of a very mean, shabby
trick which Mr. Gainsborough himself did by me ; but
his genius and good qualities overlook that. Dupont's
ingratitude and Mrs. G's. meanness I shall not over-
look." Nothing, however, seems to have come of this
threat. Thicknesse went abroad soon afterwards, and
died in 1792 while travelling in France.
In the winter following his uncle's death, Dupont was
at work upon a portrait of Pitt which Gainsborough had
begun. Bate sa^^s that Pitt "was never at leisure to sit,
and Gainsborough did not live to complete it ; but, as far
as his pencil went, it was a charming picture, and the
finishing of it by Mr. Gainsborough Dupont is in a uniform
spirit and style with the touches of his admired relative."
GAINSBOROUGH DUPONT 339
This appears to support the well-known tradition that
Dupont finished other portraits left incomplete by Gains-
borough, but it is unlikely that much was done by him
in this way. According to a writer who visited Gains-
borough's studio just before illness compelled him to lay
down the brush for ever, there were at that time few
portraits in hand, and Dupont had too many commis-
sions of his own to be able to spare time for the com-
pletion of those left by his uncle, even if the patrons
concerned would have approved of such a course, which
is by no means certain. The completion of Pitt's portrait
was probably undertaken to gratify some wish of the
Prime Minister, who liked Dupont and soon afterwards
gave him sittings for another portrait, painted for the
Bishop of Lincoln. As will be seen later, Gainsborough's
unfinished portraits, including experimental sketches
and abandoned beginnings, were sold in 1797 for any-
thing they would fetch, and, although the accumulation
of years, they numbered fewer than thirty.
The Duchess of Devonshire promised to sit to Dupont
for a three-quarter-length portrait, and commissions were
so plentiful that he announced his intention of devoting
himself entirely to painting after he had finished the mezzo-
tints of his uncle's Shepherd Boys with Fighting Dogs and
Cottage Children with an Ass. Of this determination
his friend in the Morning Herald writes : " The engraving
by this gentleman of the King from the picture of Mr.
Gainsborough, his late uncle, would make us regret that
he dechnes the appendant branch ; were it not that his
fine half-length of Mr. Pitt, his head of Mr. Adair, and the
exquisite portrait of Mr. Palmer convince us that he cannot
fail with his genius of acquiring a decided superiority over
the painters of the present hour, and contributing highly
to the advancement of the art."
But, accustomed for years to the support of the stronger
personality of his uncle, Dupont, in spite of this encourage-
ment, was still mistrustful of his powers, and it was with
340 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
difficulty that he was prevailed upon to exhibit at the
Royal Academy, where his work was seen for the first time
in 1790. His contributions in that year were A Cottage
Girl, in the manner of his uncle, and portraits of Pitt, Mr.
Grenville, Lord Bayham, Mr. Palmer (the Controller-
General of the Post Office, and an old Bath acquaintance),
and Gainsborough . It was in connection with the hanging
of the last-named portrait — in the ante-room, and close
to the ground — that Bate made the attack on the Forty
mentioned in an earher chapter. He was not the only
critic who noticed the position assigned to the portrait of
Gainsborough. The General Magazine, after praising the
portrait, says : " But why in the ante-room, and in one
of the worst situations there ? Ye Royal Academicians,
do your jealousies extend beyond the grave ? " Another
writer, speaking of Dupont's work generally, remarks that
he follows his master's manner with such closeness " that
were we not aware, to our extreme regret, that Gains-
borough is in his grave, we could have been rather peremp-
tory in asserting that the portraits of Mr. Pitt, Mr Gren-
ville, Lord Bayham, and Mr. Palmer were Gainsborough's
painting."
Soon after the close of the Academy Exhibition of
1790, Dupont advertised the publication of his mezzo-
tints of Gainsborough's portraits of the King and Queen,
which had been engraved some time before. He states
that they are in a style which does not permit of many
impressions being taken, and that the charge is two
guineas for proofs and one guinea for ordinary prints.
Specimens could be seen and subscriptions received
" at the late Mr. Gainsborough's house in Pall Mall."
Dupont's position in the household at Pall Mall was some-
times misconstrued at this period, as he is occasionally
described as " the artist who married the daughter of
Mr. Gainsborough." Dupont, as a matter of fact, re-
mained a bachelor to the end of his life.
More pictures were sent to the Academy of 1792,
GAINSBOROUGH DUPONT 341
when Bate praised Dupont effusively ; and another critic
who saw nothing in his work but an imitation of his uncle's
weaknesses, said: "We see Gainsborough's clumsy,
unfinished manner, but we look in vain for his chiaro-
scura and the clearness and beauty of his colouring."
The works shown in 1792 were the last painted by Dupont
in his uncle's studio, as Mrs. Gainsborough's tenancy of
Schomberg House came to an end in that year. Before
leaving it she endeavoured to dispose of the landscapes
by her husband which had not found purchasers at the
first sale in 1789 ; and on the ist of June, 1792, Mr.
Christie announced that on the following day at twelve
o'clock he would sell at Schomberg House the pictures
of " that ingenious and esteemed artist, Mr. Gainsborough,
deceased, comprising many of his best works, also some
capital pictures by Old Masters selected by himself,
together with a few fine drawings, and which were ex-
hibited at his house in Pall Mall." Bate, as on other
occasions, assisted the widow as much as he could in the
Morning Herald. He wrote in the paper of June 2nd :
" The brilliant collection of Gainsborough's principal
landscapes, which has drawn all the admirers of the art
to the view at Pall Mall, are this day to be disposed of
by order of his executors, under the hammer of Christie.
We shall hereafter name those of the cognoscenti who
are fortunate enough from this event to adorn their
cabinets with one or more of these inimitable scenes of
nature."
Of this sale, unfortunately, the records are very slight.
Messrs. Christie, who have been kind enough to allow me
to examine many of their catalogues, do not possess a
copy of that of the Gainsborough sale of 1792, and I
have been unable to discover one elsewhere. Fulcher,
however, appears to have seen a marked catalogue (it
was perhaps in the possession of the relatives of
Dupont at Sudbury, who inherited his property), as he
gives some figures which can, I think, relate only to this
342 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
sale. At the end of Fulcher's book there is a Hst of all
the pictures by Gainsborough exhibited on the occasion
of the first sale in 1789, and to about ten of them prices
are attached, which, from the figures, as they are odd
sums, appear to refer to a sale by auction. But the
pictures of 1789 were not sold by auction but by private
treaty, and Fulcher has evidently added to the catalogue of
this sale the prices of pictures then unsold but afterwards
disposed of by auction in 1792. That this is so is clear
from the note which Bate printed, as he promised, after
the 1792 sale. Apparently he was disappointed with the
result, as, instead of the " Ust of cognoscenti," he mentions
only that the Peasant Smoking at a Cottage Door was
knocked down at 380 guineas. This is the price (£399)
attached to the picture in Fulcher's Hst. But Bate,
who never obtrudes his own name or personality in
connection with Gainsborough, does not say that he
himself was the buyer of the Peasant Smoking at a
Cottage Door, as well as of the large Landscape with
Buildings for £304, and another landscape for £67, 4s.
He seems, indeed, to have been the principal purchaser
at the sale of 1792. The well-known picture of The Mall,
described as A Representation of St. James's Park with
Drest Figures, was one of the works sold on this occasion,
according to Fulcher, for £115, los. It had been offered
in vain for two hundred guineas at the sale of 1789.
Soon after the sale of 1792 Mrs. Gainsborough and her
daughters left Schomberg House for Sloane Street, and
Gainsborough Dupont set up house for himself at 17
Grafton Street, Fitzroy Square, where he lived for the
remainder of his fife. Gainsborough's house in Pall
Mall was taken by a miniature painter, Robert Bowyer,
who called it the Historic Gallery, and arranged in some
of its rooms an exhibition of pictures illustrating Hume's
History of England.
In the following year Dupont was an unsuccessful
candidate for an Associateship of the Royal Academy.
GAINSBOROUGH DUPONT 343
There were two vacancies, but they were filled by Hoppner
and Beechey. At this time Dupont was painting the
portraits of a number of actors and actresses for Mr.
Thomas Harris, the lessee and manager of Covent Garden
Theatre. One of these portraits, Mr. Quick in the
Character of Spado, was sent by the artist to the Academy
of 1794, where, however, his principal work was a
full-length of the King, from whom he appears to
have had many commissions. A collection of manu-
scripts, sold at Christie's a few years ago, included
an invoice of Dupont 's for " portraits painted for the
King," amounting to £493, los. ; and a letter to his
sister, Mrs. Stow, in which he says, " I have just
received an order from the King to get two large
portraits of himself and the Queen finished and put up
in Windsor Palace by the 12th of next month."
The letter is dated the 24th of July 1795, in which
year Dupont was engaged upon other portraits of the
King and Queen, painted to decorate the walls of the
newly erected Trinity House on Tower Hill, where they
still hang, together with three other works by the same
hand, full-lengths of Pitt and Lord Howe, and a large
" Portrait Group of Merchant Elder Brethren." The
group, which was the gift to Trinity House of the
Merchant Elder Brethren, is the best known work of
Gainsborough Dupont. It is about twenty feet in
length and ten in height, and hangs on the concave wall
of the Grand Staircase on a level with the large landing
known at Trinity House as " the quarter-deck." The
picture was originally hung in the Court-room, but was
removed many years ago to its present situation, in which,
unfortunately, it is impossible to judge of the merits of
its execution. In the original picture twenty-two of the
Merchant Elder Brethren were represented, but as
Captain Huddart, F.R.S., was elected soon after the group
was painted, his portrait was added on an extra piece of
canvas. Captain Huddart's portrait has been added
344 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
in similar fashion to the key-plan, neatly and carefully
drawn in pencil by Dupont.
On the right hand of the group hangs the portrait of
Pitt, looking like a feeble Gainsborough, and in likeness
curiously resembling his portrait of the statesman. The
Pitt, and the portrait of Howe that is the pendant to it,
were in fact for a long time regarded as the work of
Gainsborough, but in recent years inquiries made into
the matter by Mr. H. S. Liesching, of Trinity House,
virtually proved that they were painted by Dupont.
Lately the matter has been placed beyond dispute by
the discovery of entries in the books of 1794 and 1796.
The last entry is as follows : " Paid to Mr. Dupont for
painting portraits of their Majesties, Mr. Pitt and Lord
Howe for the new Court Room, £420." The paintings
of George the Third and his Queen hang in the Library,
one of the stately rooms at Trinity House, which contain
an interesting and valuable collection of portraits that
includes examples of Vandyke, Sir Joshua Reynolds,
and Zoffany, and such modern masters as Watts, Holl,
and Herkomer. It is curious that Dupont's portraits of
the King and Queen, like those of Pitt and Howe, were
for many years wrongly ascribed. The labels formerly
afftxed to the full-lengths of their Majesties described
them as the work of " Ramsay and pupils." Dupont
probably owed these commissions to the influence of his
patron, Pitt, who was Master of Trinity House at the
time they were executed.
Pitt was not the only great personage who bestowed
his patronage upon Dupont at this time. Early in 1796
he was commissioned to paint a portrait of the Princess
of Wales, and had arranged, as he thought, that it was
to be exhibited at the Royal Academy. He informed
the Council that he should send it to the Exhibition,
and begged that a suitable place might be reserved for
the portrait of so important a sitter. But Dupont
appears to have been no more fortunate than his uncle
GAINSBOROUGH DUPONT
By permission of Lord D'Abernon of Esher
GAINSBOROUGH DUPONT 345
in dealing with the Forty, and when the Princess's portrait
arrived at Somerset House no place was available. The
picture, therefore, was withdrawn. In July 1796 Dupont
was at Windsor painting some of George the Third's
numerous daughters, and these portraits were among
his last works, as he died at his house in Grafton Street
on the 20th of the following January, after an illness of
eight days. Bate, in a sympathetic paragraph about
the painter's death, mentioned the patronage given to
Dupont by the King and the Prime Minister, and ob-
served : " His amiable and modest manners suffered no
variation from this success. To his other qualities he
united strict rectitude and a clear sense of honour.
Dupont felt an unabating gratitude to his patrons and to
his friends — in whom he was select — he was rigidly
sincere."
Gainsborough Dupont, who was forty-two when he
died, not thirty, as some biographers have represented,
was buried with his uncle at Kew. He died intestate,
and his estate, sworn under £2000 in value, was adminis-
tered by his brother Richard, who endeavoured to dispose
of his furniture and pictures by private contract three
weeks after the funeral. The pictures then offered for
sale included some landscapes by Gainsborough, one of
which was priced at a hundred and fifty guineas, and
another, " an artist's picture, consisting of some grand
groups of trees," at a hundred guineas. The attempt
to sell by private contract appears to have been a failure,
as the property, or most of it, was put up to auction at
Christie's rooms in the following April.
This sale at Christie's, although a fiasco as far as
prices were concerned, was an affair of great interest,
as most of the pictures included in it were the unfinished
portraits by Gainsborough, concerning which nothing,
so far as I am aware, has been written. These un-
finished portraits, however, did not form part of the
estate of Dupont, but were the property of his aunt, Mrs.
346 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
Gainsborough. The auction was in fact, though not in
name, a Gainsborough sale, and Dupont's death was made
the excuse for another attempt to dispose of the remaining
works left by his uncle. Bate once again did his best for
the widow by publishing, on the morning of the sale, a long
list of the portraits that were to come under the hammer,
and the following preliminary note : " The remaining
works of our highly distinguished countryman, Mr. Gains-
borough, are to be brought forward for sale this day at
Mr. Christie's rooms. Among these are some pictures
of special merit, and what is particularly deserving the
regard of the amateur, a few dead-coloured landscapes
sketched out a short time previously to his death and
enriched with his best ideas. Several portraits are in
the collection, and as these principally appertain to names
and conditions of high note, it will be rather extraordinary
if neither personal regard, family affection, nor friendship
should not be so far awakened as to restore them to their
original alliances."
This appeal fell on deaf ears, for no one seemed anxious
to possess the portraits, whether finished or unfinished,
and they were knocked down at incredible prices, even
lower than those realised a year earlier when the un-
finished Reynolds portraits were sold at Greenwood's
auction rooms. " This kind of family canvas," said one
who was present at Greenwood's, " sold for little more
than half-a-crown a foot, but Sir Joshua's sketches and
fancy pieces had a better fate."
Less fortunate than Sir Joshua, Gainsborough's few
" fancy " pieces fared almost as badly as his portraits, and
nothing in this sale fetched tolerable prices except one or
two landscapes. The portraits were those of the Duke
and Duchess of Gloucester, the Duke and Duchess of Cum-
berland, the Duke of Bedford, Lord Abingdon, Lady
Hanham, Mrs. Howard, Mr. Wade of Brighton, Mrs.
Oswald, the Marquis Champain, Lady Eardley and child,
Lord Jersey, Lady Clive, Lady Aylesford and child, Signor
GAINSBOROUGH DUPONT 347
Savoi, Lady Maynard, Mrs. Ibbetson, Lord Powis, Lord
Stopford, Lady Berkeley, Lady Clarges, Lady Littleton,
Lady Clifford, Mrs. Methuen, Abel the musician, and Quin
the actor. Of Sir Christopher Whichcote, who died some
ten or eleven years before the sale, there were two portraits,
a half-length and a head. A record of the sums paid for
these portraits by Gainsborough should fill with envy the
breasts of the collectors of to-day, who know that the
slightest work by the master is worth its weight in gold.
Most of them, no doubt, were imperfect, but a Gains-
borough portrait, even if unfinished, is always interesting,
and frequently charming, and a kit-cat of the Duchess of
Gloucester, the mother of the beautiful LadiesWaldegrave,
must, in any case, have been cheap at £2, ids. A better
price was obtained for a full-length of the Duke of Glou-
cester, which realised £6, but for the Duke of Bedford and
Lord Jersey, sold together, the highest bid was only £2, 9s.
Another pair of portraits, Lady Clive and Lord Powis, went
for two guineas ; the full-lengths of Lady Aylesford and
child and of Lord Abingdon, for two, and two and a half
guineas respectively ; and the kit-cat of Lady Maynard for
£2, 5s. The highest price paid for a portrait was for that of
Lord Stopford, which, though only a head, was, for some
unexplained reason, run up to £7, 17s. 6d. ; but, on the other
hand, a head of Lady Clarges was knocked down for five
shilhngs, and thirteen shilhngs was the final offer for three
portraits sold in one lot, of Lady Clifford, Mrs. Howard,
and Signor Savoi. The purchaser of the three Gains-
boroughs for thirteen shillings was Caleb Whitefoord, the
wine merchant, and self-styled connoisseur of art, whose
appearance and manner are supposed to have inspired
"Wilkie's Letter of Introduction. The portrait of Signor
Savoi, who was a well-known Italian singer of Gains-
borough's day, remained in the possession of its purchaser
until his death many years afterwards. It was then
included in Whitefoord's sale, where it fetched only
a guinea and a half, although sold as a Gainsborough,
348 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
and with two or three other portraits by unnamed artists
thrown in.
According to Mr. Lionel Cust, several pictures now in
the Royal collections at Windsor or Buckingham Palace
were purchased by the Prince of Wales from Mrs. Gains-
borough after her husband's death. Of these, the portraits
of the Duke of Cumberland and Quin the actor, and the
large oil sketch of Diana and ActcBon were probably bought
at this sale. The price paid for Quin was six guineas, for
the Duke of Cumberland (including a portrait of the
Duchess), £4, 6-$'., and for the Diana and ActcGon, which
was afterwards hung at Carlton House, -£2, 3.^.
Of the subject and " fancy " pictures by Gainsborough
two or three call for remark. A Nymph at the Bath (large
oval) must have been, I think, the hitherto unidentified
National Gallery picture known as Musidora. It fetched
three guineas at the sale of 1797 ; where a sketch by
Gainsborough, The Assumption of the Virgin, was sold for
only twenty-two shillings, and the whole-length, The
Housemaid, unfinished, for four guineas and a half. There
can be very little doubt that this unfinished whole-
length is the picture recently presented to the National
Gallery by Lady Carlisle, and said to be a study of the
Hon. Mrs. Graham, the original of the masterpiece at
Edinburgh. The Housemaid was acquired by a purchaser
named Bryan, perhaps the original compiler of the well-
known Dictionary of Artists and Engravers, who dealt largely
in pictures. Another painting knocked down at this sale
for three guineas. Girl Gathering Mushrooms, is probably
The Mushroom Gatherer lent to the Royal Academy in
1887 by Mr. W. C. Alexander.
A View in St. fames's Park, with figures, may have
been a small study for the well-known picture exhibited as
The Park at Gainsborough's house in 1784, and in 1789
and 1792 as A Representation of St. fames's Park with
Drest Figures, and now known as The Mall. That the
picture offered for sale in 1797 was identical with the one
GAINSBOROUGH DUPONT 349
shown in earlier years, is most unlikely. According to
Fulcher's list of works disposed of at the auction of 1792,
The Mall, as we call it, was sold to a Mr. Skirrow for
;^ii5, los. The picture sold in 1797 as A View in St.
James's Park, was put up as the property of Mrs, Gains-
borough, and fetched only thirty guineas. The history
of The Mall is altogether somewhat obscure. It is sup-
posed to have passed, some time after the sale of 1792,
into the possession of Mr. Samuel Kilderbee of Ipswich,
and was certainly sold with his collection at Christie's in
1829. But it is equally certain that Frost, the Ipswich
drawing-master, owned a large version of The Mall, and
that it was in his house in 1820.
Of the Gainsboroughs sold in 1797 only the unfinished
Haymaker and Sleeping Girl was catalogued as Dupont's.
It had been given to him by his uncle in the last year
of his life. One day Dupont's work pleased Gains-
borough so much that as a reward he offered his nephew
any picture in the studio. The Woodman was on the
wall, but Dupont selected the Haymaker, to the surprise
and disappointment of Gainsborough, who tried in vain
to make him alter his choice. At the sale the highest
bid for the Haymaker was ;^29, Ss. It was therefore
kept by the Dupont family, in whose possession it remained
until 1872, The plate of Dupont's mezzotint of Mrs.
Sheridan was included in the 1797 sale, as well as two
portraits of the same lady. All three, however, appear
to have been withdrawn, probably at Sheridan's re-
quest, as each entry in the catalogue is marked " De-
livered to Miss Gainsborough." The copper plate of
Dupont's mezzotint of Gainsborough's 1784 portrait,
The Three Eldest Princesses, together with ninety-two
prints, fetched £8, i8s. 6d. With the pictures and engrav-
ings by Dupont were sold the furniture and equipment
of his studio. Most of this, no doubt, came originally from
Schomberg House, as Gainsborough in his will desired
that his nephew should have such things as he required
350 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
connected with " the painting business." But the seven
easels, some of which must have been used by Gains-
borough, colour stands, mirrors, canvases, paints, and
fifty-three dozen brushes brought, altogether, less than
five pounds.
Mrs. Gainsborough, although she made constant en-
deavours to dispose of her husband's pictures, retained
until her death his sketch-books and collections of en-
gravings, his library — such as it was — and many other
things of personal interest. She died at her house in
Sloane Street in December, 1798, and was buried at Kew.
" Her amiable quahties," says the chronicler of the event,
" will long be remembered by those who had the happiness
of knowing her, and the most sincere regret is felt for the loss
of so estimable a character." Among the property left by
her to her eldest daughter Margaret were " the three small
landscapes in oil colours and all the drawings in gilt frames,
the picture of the Old Cart Horse in oil colours, the fine
bronze in the back drawing-room, all the family pictures,
the three very small landscapes in oil colours in my bed-
room, the two varnished drawings in oval gilt frames, and
the Diploma signed by King George the Third." The
Old Cart Horse is perhaps the study in the National Gallery
(No. 1484), which was presented in 1896 by the Misses Lane,
together with other pictures formerly in possession of the
Gainsboroughs. The diploma was, of course, that of the
Royal Academy, an institution that the widow apparently
scorned to mention.
She directed in her will that all the remaining pictures
in her possession should be sold, and the proceeds invested ;
and on the 8th of May 1799 it was announced that " the
private studies and sketches of the celebrated artist, Gains-
borough, which have been till now reserved by the family,"
could be seen at Christie's, and were to be sold in a few
days. Mrs. Gainsborough's daughter Margaret, who was
the executrix, does not appear to have allowed senti-
ment to stand in the way when disposing of her father's
GAINSBOROUGH DUPONT 351
belongings, for she sold not only his sketches and engrav-
ings, but his books and musical instruments. Two or
three pictures were also included in the sale ; and of these
two half-lengths of ladies by Gainsborough found a buyer
at a guinea the pair, and a Portrait oj a Lady and Child,
ascribed to Lely, fetched thirty shillings. The sketch-
books, ten in number, contained between five and six
hundred drawings, and they realised altogether about a
hundred and fifty pounds. In one of the books were
" fifty-eight Itahan scenes of architecture and landscape."
This is curious, as Gainsborough, though he is said to
have travelled on the Continent, certainly never saw Italy.
Mrs. Gainsborough, though she had given Dupont many of
her husband's studio properties, had, for some reason,
preserved his two lay-figures. The better of these figures,
upon which doubtless the painter disposed the draperies
of some of his finest portraits, was described as " most
ingeniously constructed with brass-work joints." It
was sold for three pounds.
The lay-figures, purchased probably by some artist
of the time, have been lost sight of altogether, with the
rest of Gainsborough's professional apphances. Seventy
years ago, Wilham Collins, R.A., owned a painting-table
that had belonged to Gainsborough, but none of his palettes
appear to exist, or any other rehc of his studio, unless the
penknife in the possession of the Royal Academy can be
so described. This penknife, with a handle of ivory or
bone, was given by Mrs. Gainsborough to her niece, Mrs.
Lane, the mother of Richard Lane, A.R.A. By Lane it
was given to Charles Robert Leshe, RA., whose son, Mr.
G. D. Leshe, RA., presented it some years ago to the
Roj^'al Academy.
Gainsborough's large collection of prints included
about sixty engravings from the pictures of his rival. Sir
Joshua Reynolds, thirty-five after Vandyke, and thirty-
two after Claude. A book of fifty-four drawings of ship-
ping in Indian ink by Vandevelde, " exceedingly fine," a
352 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
blunderbuss, a set of tools, " a curious tin book to serve
as a portfolio for drawings " ; a Spanish guitar, and a lute,
were among the miscellaneous articles belonging to Gains-
borough that figured in the sale. It is interesting to learn
that the lute became the property of a distinguished
painter, who had long been one of Gainsborough's sincerest
admirers. Written against the entry of the instrument
in Christie's catalogue is a note of instruction to the
auctioneer, " Buy this for Mr. Hoppner," and to John
Hoppner the lute fell at the price of £2, los. William
Jackson, of Exeter, in his essay on Gainsborough, says
that the painter " detested reading," and the books sold
in 1799 were certainly not those of a reading man. Several
were upon architecture, a subject in which Gainsborough
appears to have been interested ; and the others included
the book on perspective by his Ipswich friend, Kirby, and
another on the same subject by Malton ; Angelo's School
0/ Fencing, Stubbs' Anaiotny oj the Horse, two volumes
of Walpole's Anecdotes of Painting in England, Campbell's
Vitruviiis, Chambers' Civil Architecture, Gibbs' Architec-
ture, Wood's Ruins of Baalhec, Spence's Polymetis, and
Birch's Lives of Illustrious Persons in Great Britain. This
last item is interesting, for the fact that Gainsborough
had such a costly book in his possession gives colour to the
story that he worked upon its illustrations in his boyhood
soon after his first arrival in London.
Gainsborough's two daughters both lived to be old
women, but very little is known of their proceedings after
the death of their mother. One of them must have
painted, as in early catalogues of picture-sales landscapes
by " Miss Gainsborough " are occasionally mentioned.
The sisters were living at Brook Green, Hammersmith.
in 1803, but afterwards moved two or three miles
farther out, to Acton, then a quiet and comparatively re-
mote little village. An Ipswich friend mentions them as
still residing in Acton in 18 18, when Margaret is described
as odd in her behaviour, and her sister quite deranged.
GAINSBOROUGH DUPONT 353
At Acton, according to Mr. Henry Mitchell, the
sisters lived in a detached house on the hill, upon the
site of which the police station now stands Here
Margaret made the acquaintance of a young artist named
Briggs, who hved in the same neighbourhood, and into
the hands of Briggs passed certain pictures by Gains-
borough which had descended to his daughter. It has
frequently been asserted that Margaret Gainsborough
bequeathed these pictures to Briggs, but this was not
the case. Except to relatives, she made only one bequest,
and that was to a servant. The bulk of her property,
which was valued for probate at £8000, she left to three
female cousins, one of whom, the Mrs. Sophia Lane, al-
ready mentioned, acted as her executrix.
Margaret Gainsborough died on December 18, 1820,
and her younger sister, Mary Fischer, in July, 1826. For
Mary Fischer death was a happy release. In 1824, two
years before the end, this once beautiful woman was de-
scribed as having long survived her mental faculties, and as
" now doomed to all human speculation to waste the re-
mainder of her life in the vain pomp and self-complacency
of fancied Royalty."
I have been unable to discover where Gainsborough's
daughters are buried, but it is not at Acton. Although
their names are not inscribed on the stone with those of
Gainsborough, his wife and nephew, it is still possible
that the sisters are interred in the family grave at Kew,
from which Acton is but a short distance. Unfortunately,
nothing can be learned from the local records concerning
the burial of any of the Gainsboroughs at Kew, as some
of the registers of the church were stolen about seventy
years ago, and have never been recovered.
CHAPTER XIX
NOTES AND ANECDOTES
Gainsborough at Lulworth — Origin of The Market Cart — Anecdotes of
his landscapes — "The Man in Pall Mall" — An amateur touches
up his picture — His poor opinion of English landscape subjects
— As a musician — Jackson's unfairness to him — Contemporary
evidence of his skill — The influence of Giardini — Romney and
Giardini — Bate on Gainsborough's music — " He played always
to the feelings " — Colonel Hamilton fiddles for a picture —
The Colonel identified — The picture described — Influence of
Abel's music on Gainsborough — He dances on a pewter quart
pot — Gainsborough intoxicated — Singular story — A brilliant con-
versationalist — He meets Dr. Johnson — Catches his trick of
nodding the head — Gainsborough's ambition to paint Shake-
spearean subjects — Painting by candle light — Model landscapes
— The little table under the dresser — The Eidophusikon — " Our
Thunder is the best."
A FEW months after Gainsborough's death, it was an-
nounced in several journals that a volume of anecdotes
concerning the artist was in the press, and that in this
volume particular praise would be given to Lord Gains-
borough, Lord Porchester, Sir Francis Basset, Sir Peter
Burrell, and Mr. Tollemache, " for that spirit and taste
by which his admirable pictures of rustic history were
encouraged." The announcement was no mere rumour,
for Bate wrote encouragingly of the proposed book, which,
however, does not appear to have been produced. There
are no further references to it in contemporary newspapers,
and apparently the idea was abandoned of publishing
these anecdotes, which might have been of the greatest
interest and value. But many stories were told by Bate
and others about Gainsborough both before and after his
death, and some of these — ^unmentioned hitherto in any
biography of the painter — are included in this chapter.
354
NOTES AND ANECDOTES 355
Little or nothing has been known of Gainsborough's
journeys about the country in search of recreation and
of material for his landscapes, but an interesting glimpse
of him as a traveller is given by Bate in an article written
soon after the painter's death :
" This great genius, schooled in Nature's extensive
seminary, and not in Academies, about six years before
his death made a tour through the West of England, to
observe the diversity of landscape, the varied combina-
tions of objects, and the tinges of hue in a country so
rich and romantic. In one of his extraordinary excur-
sions Lulworth Castle caught his eye. The rich effect of
the building, the trees and other scenery, so enchanted
this enthusiast of the palette, this poet in colour, that he
alighted from his horse and desired his nephew and
fellow-traveller, Mr. Gainsborough Dupont, to do the
same.
" Their saddle-bags generally contained their fare, and
they took their repast under some ancient trees, contem-
plating the distant beauties which every vista opened to
the eye. Here they were accosted by a venerable looking
personage, who prevailed upon them to repair to the
Castle. They comphed, and he led them to the battle-
ments, where the enraptured eye of Gainsborough feasted
on an expanse of prospect, everywhere embellished with
the rich tintings of the retiring sun. His mind in this
luxuriant gratification became stored with some of those
beautiful ideas which he afterwards diffused through the
fine landscape in Sir Peter Burrell's possession — and the
still more enchanting landscape in Mrs. Gainsborough's
rooms (the companion to Sir Peter's picture) also retains
a fervour from this visit."
The venerable stranger who invited them into the
Castle proved to be the steward of Mr. Weld, the owner
of Lulworth, and Gainsborough always spoke with
pleasure of his kindness. "If," said Bate at the end of
his article, " this anecdote has not before reached the
knowledge of the liberal possessor of Lulworth, it is now
recorded in order that the testimony of so accurate a
judge of nature may be adverted to in proof of the beauties
of this ancient seat." The pictures inspired by Gains-
356 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
borough's visit to Lulworth, a neighbourhood whose
charm attracts strongly the painters of our own time,
were The Market Cart, now in the National Gallery,
and A Peasant Smoking at a Cottage Door, which the
editor of the Morning Herald himself purchased two or
three years after he told the story.
As we see by the visit to Lulworth, Gainsborough
sought inspiration from nature for his landscapes when-
ever it was possible, although in his later years he no
longer copied the trees and grasses with the painstaking
fidelity of the work of the Suffolk period. A writer in
the Repository of Arts in 1813 says that before Gains-
borough's day artists and amateurs alike were content
to make their landscape compositions from Italian,
Dutch, and Flemish prints ; and that not only were
their pictures unhke English scenery in character, but
those versed in art could readily point out whence a tree,
a rock, or a building had been stolen A foreground of
Wynants, a background of Claude, and cows and sheep
from Berghem and Paul Potter were all introduced into
the same picture.
" Thus it is," says the writer of 1813, " that the works
of the EngHsh landscape painters, until within a few
years, are worthy of the places to which they are usually
consigned ; to ascend from the drawing-rooms of the
mansions where they once were placed, to the apartments
of the ser\'ants, until by an almost certain fate they be-
come fixtures, without frames, upon the damp walls of
a broker's shop. . . . Gainsborough's sketches improved
the general taste for English landscape composition ;
he taught the artists and amateurs how to select, and
those who, before the appearance of his rude oaks and
deep-rutted lanes, his rustic figures and moss-grown
cottages and bams, were content to amuse themselves
by making landscape compositions from prints, now left
their painting-rooms to explore the scenery of their own
country and to work from nature."
Many years earUer, while Gainsborough was working
in the fulness of his powers, the infinite superiority of his
NOTES AND ANECDOTES 357
landscapes to the conventional efforts of the older school,
was already recognised by the more intelligent critics.
Some time before Gainsborough's death an article called
Hittts to Professors of Landscape Painting, in which
perhaps the hand of John Hoppner may be traced,
appeared in the Morning Post. Writing in a strain of con-
temptuous irony, the author tells the artists of the still
popular artificial school that their best plan is to take the
blackest Old Master landscape they can find and copy it.
If they are lucky there is a good chance that in a year or
two it may be taken for a pearl, and the plan had the
further advantage that they could do their work at their
own firesides and save the risk of catching cold in the
dews of the fields. He concludes :
" If you paint for the connoisseurs, never attempt
at simple elegance, picturesque ideas of nature, brilliancy
of colouring, or taste in the grouping of your figures.
Leave all this nonsense to the man in Pall Mall, who
is so cursedly obstinate that instead of seeking for a
manner in the Old School and giving you Athenian
Temples and Roman Ruins in English Landscape, he fills
his canvas with unthatched cottages and their bare-
legged inhabitants. This is vulgar nature — pray avoid it."
This, however, was written at a time when Gains-
borough, though his example had not yet destroyed the
old school, had achieved distinction as a landscape
painter, and was able to sell his work without much
difficulty. How little his landscape was appreciated at
an earlier period may be judged from a story of an
impudent attempt to improve one of his pictures by re-
touching, told by his friend of Bath and London, Prince
Hoare :
"This eminent painter," says he, "whose contempt
for the follies of mankind kept pace with his acute
observation of them, was so disgusted at the blind
preference paid to his powers of portraiture that for
many years of his residence at Bath he regularly shut
up all his landscapes in the back apartments of his house,
358 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
to which no common visitors were admitted. The land-
scape that first found its way into any collection was
purchased of him by the late Henry Hoare, Esq., of
Stourhead, on a friend's recommendation ! and so little
even then was the merit of Gainsborough duly estimated
that Mr. Bampfylde, a dilettante in painting, being on a
visit to Stourhead, offered to mend Gainsborough's sheep
by repainting them, and was allowed to do so. They
have been restored to their original deficiencies by the
taste and good sense of the present possessor of that
beautiful place."
The " present possessor " of Stourhead at the time
Prince Hoare wrote was Sir Richard Colt Hoare, the
well-known antiquary.
From the remarks of Prince Hoare and others it is
evident that, putting portraiture apart, intelHgent con-
temporary opinion regarded Gainsborough as we regard
him now : as a great innovator, a man who recognised
the beauties of English rural landscape and painted it
as he saw it, comparatively uninfluenced by the arti-
ficialities of the school that was then in fashion. Yet
there is a letter at the British Museum in which this fore-
runner of the naturalistic painters, who had so obstinately
persisted in filling his canvases with rustic cottages and
English peasantry, affects to despise the subjects of his
own country. The letter, written at Bath about 1762,
is addressed to Lord Hardwicke, who seems to have
asked Gainsborough to paint a picture for him of some
particular spot in which he was interested. The artist's
reply is astonishing :
" Mr. Gainsborough presents his humble respects to
Lord Hardwicke, and shall always think it an honour to
be employed in anything for his Lordship, but with
respect to real views from Nature in this country he has
never seen any place that affords a Subject equal to the
poorest imitations of Gaspar (Poussin) or Claude. Paul
Sandby is the only man of genius, he believes, who has
employed his pencil that way. Mr. G. hopes that Lord
Hardwicke will not mistake his meaning, but if his Lord-
NOTES AND ANECDOTES 359
ship wishes to have anything tolerable of the name of
Gainsborough, the subject altogether, as well as figures,
&c., must be of his own brain ; otherwise Lord Hard-
wicke will only pay for encouraging a man out of his
way, and had much better buy a picture of some of the
good Old Masters."
The reference to Sandby suggests that Lord Hard-
wicke wanted Gainsborough to paint a view of his seat.
Sandby did work of this kind, and one of the pictures
he contributed to the first exhibition of the Society of
Artists in 1760 was A View of Lord Har court's Seat at
Newnham.
Many stories of Gainsborough's musical tastes and
acquirements were in circulation after his death, and
they contrast strangely with the contemptuous opinion
of the painter's skill given by the composer, WilHam
Jackson of Exeter. Jackson, whose early friendship
with Gainsborough I have described in Chapter III,
claimed in his essay on the artist to be better acquainted
with his character than any other person. Further, he
declared that in writing of Gainsborough he had divested
himself of all partiality and had spoken of him as he
really was. " As his skill in music has been celebrated,
I will, before I speak of him as a painter, mention what
degree of merit he possessed as a musician. When I
first knew him at Bath, where Giardini had been ex-
hibiting his then unrivalled powers on the violin ; his
excellent performance made Gainsborough enamoured
of that instrument, and conceiving, like the servant
maid in the Spectator, that the music lay in the fiddle,
he was frantic until he possessed the very instrument
which had given him so much pleasure, but seemed
surprised that the music of it remained behind with
Giardini." Jackson then gives a long and extravagant
account of Gainsborough's passion for acquiring the
instruments of eminent performers, in the vain hope
that he might produce from them tones equal to those
36o THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
of the original possessors, and concludes, " In this
manner he frittered away his musical talents, and though
possessed of ear, taste, and genius, he never had appli-
cation enough to learn his notes. He scorned to take
the first step, the second was of course out of his reach,
and the third was unattainable." Jackson pubUshed
his essay ten years after Gainsborough's death, and his
statements were soon challenged. His estimate of the
painter as a musician was thought absurd, and some
critics did not hesitate to suggest that Jackson's unkind
remarks were inspired by jealousy. Gainsborough, it
was hinted, had not shown sufficient appreciation of
Jackson's painting — which, by the way, is described as
" contemptible " by another artist of the time.
Among those who found fault with the composer
was a correspondent of the Monthly Mirror, who wrote as
follows :
" ' Gainsborough's profession,' says Mr. Jackson,
' was painting, and music was his amusement, yet there
were times when music seemed to be his employment
and painting his diversion.' This observation is well
founded ; but when the essayist proceeds to relate a
series of improbable tales in order to expose the musical
caprice of our great artist ; when he represents him to
have been so enamoured of Giardini's violin, of Abel's
viol da gamba, and of Fischer's hautboy as to conceive
that the excellence of each performer resided in his in-
strument ; and lastly, when Gainsborough, who possessed
ear, taste, and genius, and who sometimes made music
an employment, is yet said to have scorned to take the
first step, never having had application to learn his notes,
surprise is excited by the contradictory assertion. Your
present correspondent has more than once seen Gains-
borough playing from notes ; but not content with his
own ocular testimony he has applied to several musicians
of eminence who had a personal knowledge of the artist,
and they unite in opposing Mr. Jackson's statement.
One of them assures me that Abel composed a fugue
purposely for his friend Gainsborough to practice on the
viol da gamba. And this could not be done without
NOTES AND ANECDOTES 361
having learnt his notes. I am told that the above cele-
brated artist and musician, who had once been convivial
associates, were of late years estranged from each other,
and I therefore impute to a lapsus memoricB what I
cannot suppose to have arisen from intentional misre-
presentation."
It is curious that Giardini, whose music so enraptured
Gainsborough, should also have filled the breast of Romney
with ambition to excel as a musician. Romney, when a
youth, heard Giardini play at \\Tiitehaven, and was so
moved by the strains of his violin that he hesitated for
a time as to whether he should devote himself to music
or to painting. As we know, painting prevailed, but
Romney, hke Gainsborough, found in the violin the
occasional solace of his leisure hours. Romney, how-
ever, not only played on fiddles but made them, before he
came to London, and preserved to the end of his life
the instrument that he regarded as his masterpiece. At
his house Romney's friends sometimes heard him play
upon a fiddle of his own manufacture in a room hung
round with pictures he himself had painted.
Bate, who was a performer on the violoncello, speaks
in high terms of the musical ability of Gainsborough,
which he declared was sufficient in itself to have secured
him celebrity. Some of his remarks, made a week after
the artist's death, were prompted by the pubHcation of a
story told by Thicknesse, who oddly enough makes a
similar suggestion to that of Jackson about the import-
ance the painter attached to particular instruments. In
this anecdote, which is not to be found in Thicknesse's
hfe of Gainsborough, it is said that he —
" Having admired Abel's viol da gamba for its fine
tone, \\ithout perhaps considering how much the power
of the bow and touch contributed to it, Abel presented it
to him. Gainsborough immediately stretched two large
canvas frames, and declared he would paint him a couple
of his best landscapes, and send them in return completely
362 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
finished and framed before he touched a brush for the
first person in the kingdom, and did so."
A day or two later the editor of the Morning Herald,
after correcting the statement about the defacement of
the Duchess of Devonshire's portrait, to which I have
already referred, corrects Thicknesse again as follows :
"The writer says, ' Mr. Gainsborough having admired
Abel's viol da gamba for its fine tone, without perhaps
considering how much the power of the bow contributed
to it, Abel presented it to him.' WTiat the writer says
of the 'power of the bow, &c.,' evidently betrays how
ignorant he is of Gainsborough's musical powers. He
touched that instrument with the most exquisite skill,
truth, and expression ; and in an adagio movement, or
largo, his richness of tone, expression, and feeling
brought him very near indeed to Abel's standard. Let
a musician who has heard him, speak, and he will confess
this. Dr. Walcot, who is an excellent musical critic,
after hearing Gainsborough about two years since, in an
adjoining room, play a minuet of Vanhall's, and an
allegro air, exclaimed, ' That must be Abel, for by God,
no man besides can so touch an instrument ! ' Mr. Abel
certainly presented Gainsborough with a viol da gamba,
but this was in return for two valuable landscapes and
several beautiful drawings. This instrument was worth
little, but at Mr. Abel's death the instrument which
Mr. Gainsborough seriously admired he purchased, and
paid forty guineas for ; and at the same sale the presents
from the genius of the pencil to the musician sold for
about £200, though they consisted only of a part of his
liberal gifts."
One of the "liberal gifts" disposed of at the sale
after Abel's death was acquired by another musical friend
of Gainsborough's, the violoncellist Crosdill, whose por-
trait he sent to the Academy of 1780. The gift referred
to was the painting lent by Crosdill to the Gainsborough
exhibition held in 1814 at the British Institution, where
it was catalogued as Fox Dogs. A critic of the exhibi-
tion of 1814, who knew Crosdill, says that the dogs at
the time they were painted belonged to Abel, and that
the picture was presented to him by Gainsborough in
NOTES AND ANECDOTES 363
return for lessons on the viol da gamba. He adds that
when the painting of the dogs was first sent to Abel's
house " the deception was so complete that the elder
subject, irritated at the presence of a supposed rival,
flew at her own resemblance with such fury that it was
found necessary to place the picture in a situation where
it was free from her jealous anger."
Another of Abel's pictures, a portrait of himself by
Gainsborough, was sold in January 1788, six months
after the musician's death, for only nine guineas, although,
as the indignant chronicler reports, the frame alone
was worth the money. This was possibly the same
portrait of Abel by Gainsborough that was placed a few
weeks later above the orchestra in the Concert Room
at Hanover Square, where it took the place of a deplor-
able painting of Apollo which had previously figured
there.
Although Jackson says that Gainsborough disHked
singing, he appears to have had some interest in, or
connection mth, the Opera House. Six years before his
death a writer in the Morning Chronicle expresses the
opinion that all the recent improvements in the decora-
tion of the Opera House did not compensate for the loss
of Gainsborough's fine figure of Comic Dancing that
formerly adorned it. He asks in what collection or
cabinet this masterpiece is preserved, and hints that it
may have been removed from the Opera House because
every comic dancer on the stage suffered by comparison
with it, whether French, English, or Itahan. Gains-
borough subsequently painted two other figures for the
Opera House, one of which was placed on each side
of the stage, but these were also removed in 1784, when
Corinthian pillars were substituted for them.
Gainsborough, according to Bate, was skilled in all
keyed instruments, but was most strongly attached to
stringed ones. " He played always to the feelings, but,
as he hated parade, he could never be prevailed upon
364 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
to display this talent except to his most select friends."
There is other evidence to show that Gainsborough was
a capable executant on more than one instrument.
Parke, the oboe player, from whose memoirs I have
quoted earlier in this volume, says that he was an excel-
lent violin player ; and more than forty years ago, in
Notes and Queries, Mr. Edward F. Rimbault, son of the
musician Stephen Francis Rimbault, wrote on the same
subject : " This great painter was not only an enthusi-
astic lover of music, but a respectable performer on the
harpsichord. I have frequently heard my father speak
of his performance on this instrument in terms of great
praise." Angelo, who remembered Gainsborough playing
on his mother's harpsichord, states that he not only knew
his notes but could accompany a slow movement on the
harpsichord with taste and feehng both on the violin and
the flute. Angelo describes as a caricature Jackson's
sketch of the musical eccentricities of the painter, and
adds : " Had Gainsborough outlived the witty musician
he might perhaps with equal truth have given the world
as satirical — not to say unfriendly — a posthumous de-
scription of Jackson's attempt with the palette and
painting brushes." After reading what Rimbault and
Angelo say about Gainsborough and the harpsichord, it
is curious to recall Jackson's remark about the painter
in connection with the same instrument : "He hated
the harpsichord." It will be remembered that Gains-
borough purchased a harpsichord from Messrs. Broad-
wood just before he left Bath for London, but this may
have been for the use of his daughters, one of whom is
said to have been an accomplished musician.
Whatever degree of skill Gainsborough may have pos-
sessed as a performer, it is certain that he was extra-
ordinarily susceptible to the influence of music. A well-
known instance of this is recorded by J. T. Smith in his
life of NoUekens the sculptor. Smith, when he visited
Gainsborough's studio in company with Nollekens found
THE BOY AT THE STILE
By permission of Sir Ralph Anstriither
NOTES AND ANECDOTES 365
the painter listening to a violin solo. He held up his
finger to silence the newcomers while the musician,
Colonel Hamilton, played on in such exquisite fashion,
that Gainsborough promised him, if he would but con-
tinue, to give him the picture of The Boy at the Stile,
which the Colonel had often wished to purchase. For half
an hour the violinist held the painter entranced and then
departed in a coach, taking with him the promised picture.
This story has been retold by most of Gainsborough's
biographers, but as far as I am aware, none of them
gives any clue to the identity of the Colonel, or infor-
mation concerning the picture he received as a gift.
The violinist was Colonel James Hamilton of the Second
Regiment of the Foot Guards, the eldest son of Lord
Anne Hamilton, and grandson of that Duke of Hamilton
whose death in Hyde Park at the hand of Lord Mohun
is described in a famous passage in Thackeray's Esmond.
Colonel Hamilton, of Scottish descent on the side of his
father, had many interests in England. Born at Bath,
some years before Gainsborough settled in that city, he
married an EngUsh wife who, by a singular chance, came
from Hintlesham in Suffolk, a village between Sudbury,
the town of Gainsborough's birth, and Ipswich. The
Colonel, who was not only a fine musician, but a boxer
who could stand up to Mendoza the champion of the
prize-ring, was also a patron of the fine arts, and one of
the fortunate few upon whom Gainsborough had bestowed
gifts of the drawings that he would never part with for
money. Colonel Hamilton's daughter married General
Anstruther, who died with Moore at Corunna, leaving
a son who succeeded to the baronetcy of Anstruther of
Balcaskie. Gainsborough's Boy at the Stile is now in the
possession of the present baronet, Sir Ralph Anstruther,
through whose courtesy I am able to give a reproduction
of this interesting httle picture. It is an oil-painting on
panel, thirteen inches by eleven, light and pleasant in
tone.
366 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
Of the way in which Abel with his viol da gamba
could influence Gainsborough a singular story was told
soon after Abel's death, and while the painter was still
living. It was related in the St. James's Chronicle by
the same correspondent, "M.M.," who was in the studio
of Gainsborough when he was painting the Prince of
Wales's horse, and noticed an error in the drawing of
the animal's foot. " M.M." speaks with due appreciation
of Abel's talent, but asserts that it could only be esti-
mated fully by those who had heard him play in the
particular condition which alone drew forth his supremest
excellencies.
" Justly admired as he was at his public perform-
ances, it was only a few of his intimate friends in private
who were witnesses of his wonderful musical powers,
to come at which, however, a bottle or two of good
Burgundy before him and his viol da gamba within
reach were necessary. In that situation friends would
introduce the subject of the human passions, and Abel,
not very capable of expressing in English his own senti-
ments, would catch up his viol da gamba and tell the
story of Lefevre thereon until he brought tears to the
eyes of his hearers ; and not lay it down again till he
had made his friend Gainsborough dance a hornpipe on
the bottom of a pewter quart pot."
This undignified picture of the great painter in a
moment of relaxation suggests that all the Burgundy
was not consumed by Abel when he ga\e in music the
pathetic tale of Sterne's poor Lieutenant. It will be
remembered that Windham, in the story of the Sudbury
election told in the first chapter, speaks of Gainsborough
as intoxicated for a whole day, and another story
related a few years after his death indicates that he occa-
sionally overstepped the bounds of propriety with con-
sequences dangerous to himself. In the correspondence
about Gainsborough in the Monthly Mirror one of the
writers tells a remarkable story w^hich he says was com-
municated to him by a friend of Gainsborough's. The
NOTES AND ANECDOTES 367
friend had been present at a party where the artist him-
self told the tale only a few days after the adventure
to which it refers :
" Gainsborough had dined one day with Abel the
musician, where the company drank very freely, and
although much intoxicated he insisted on going home
alone. It being late and dark he fell on to the pavement,
and unable to rise, lay there till he fell asleep. A woman
of the town seeing a gentleman in this situation, placed
him in a coach, and having taken him to her lodgings
put him to bed in a state of insensibility. In the morning
Gainsborough awoke, amazed to find himself in a strange
room, and ignorant of the manner in which he got there.
He now began to reflect on his situation, and getting
silently out of bed to examine his pockets, found his pocket-
book gone with its contents, and also his gold watch.
Alarmed for the loss of these, and doubtful how to act,
he again got into bed. In a short time the woman
appeared, and finding her guest awake, and restless and
uneasy, inquired the cause. He told her of his loss, and
that in the book were bills to the amount of £430, which
he had received the day before. She then told him that
the book and watch were in her possession, and informed
him of the manner in which she had discovered him, and
the following circumstances. It was her misfortune, she
told him, to be connected with a young man of bad
habits and disposition, who, had he visited her on the
previous night, as she expected, would have robbed
him of everything valuable. Gainsborough gave her
the odd £30, and having thanked her, departed. He
continued a friend to her till his death."
In the notes on Gainsborough by Bate, already
referred to, there are several other interesting pieces of
information about the painter's habits and ideas. Jack-
son in his essay says that Gainsborough's conversation
was sprightly but Hcentious, and that he hated the
common topics "or any of a superior cast." Bate, on
the other hand, declares that " in conversation his ideas
and expression discovered a mind full of rich fancies and
elegant truths — it is not an exaggeration to say that two
368 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
of the first writers of the age, Mr. Sheridan and Mr.
Tickell, have frequently been witnesses of the most
astonishing bursts of genius from him at these moments,
and never fail to bear testimony of his pregnant imagina-
tion."
From another source we learn that Gainsborough,
when dining with Garrick, made the acquaintance of
Dr. Johnson, whose peculiarities interested and amused
him to an uncommon degree. But unfortunately through
watching Johnson, the painter, himself a sensitive and
impressionable man, acquired some of his habits of
involuntary twitching and gesticulation. For a month
or two Gainsborough could not keep still, sleeping or
waking. "In fact," said he, "I became as full of
megrims as the old literary leviathan himself, and fancied
that I was changed into a Chinese automaton, and con-
demned incessantly to shake my head." WTiile under
the influence of what he called " the Johnsonian spell,"
Gainsborough made a sketch of Johnson's brown wig as
he saw it above the top of a book of old EngHsh plays
in which the short-sighted doctor buried his face when
reading in an armchair at Garrick's. Dr. Johnson, it
is said, always spoke respectfully of Gainsborough to
the Garricks ; mentioning the painter as " the ingenious
Mr. Gainsborough," or " your sprightly friend."
We never think of Gainsborough as a painter of
history, or of pictures that owe their motives to incidents
borrowed from fiction or the drama, but Bate says that he
was ambitious to paint Shakespearean subjects, and that
had he lived we should have had from his hand illus-
trations of the Grave-digger in Hamlet, and of Timon in
solitude. From the same authority we learn that the
artist completed by candlehght the pictures of The
Woodman, the Peasant Smoking at his Cottage Door, the
Boy at the Fire, and the Boy and Cat. This is men-
tioned in a note on Sir Joshua's well-known comments
in his Fourteenth Discourse on Gainsborough's practice of
NOTES AND ANECDOTES 369
painting by artificial light : a practice that was, in the
President's opinion, " very advantageous and improving
to an artist."
In the same discourse Sir Joshua spoke of another
plan of Gainsborough's, of the usefulness of which he
was more than doubtful. " He even framed a model of
landscapes on his table ; composed of broken stones,
dried herbs, and pieces of looking-glass, which he magni-
fied and improved into rocks, trees, and water." Years
afterwards a veteran " Amateur of Painting " gave an
interesting ghmpse of Gainsborough amusing himself
with his model landscapes. The old amateur was making
an appeal to the public in aid of Dubourg, long an in-
genious maker of cork models, but at this time infirm and
a pensioner of the Academy ; and in his letter he referred
to the adaptability of cork, and declared that Gainsborough
often used it in his table models.
" I had the honour," he said, " to be acquainted with
that truly British genius at Bath, and have more than
once sat by him of an evening and seen him make models
• — or rather thoughts — for landscape scenery on a little
old-fashioned folding oak table, which stood under his
kitchen dresser, such an one as I have often seen by
the fireplace of a little clean, country ale-house. This
table, held sacred for the purpose, he would order to be
brought to his parlour, and thereon compose his designs.
He would place cork or coal for his foregrounds ; make
middle grounds of sand and clay, bushes of mosses and
lichens, and set up distant woods of broccoli."
It is easy to understand that the painter who liked
to amuse himself with building up these toy landscapes
was enchanted when he saw De Loutherbourg's Eido-
phusikon, an ingenious exhibition of moving pictures
which the French artist showed on a small stage of his
own contrivance. The Eidophusikon was for a time the
fashion in London as an entertainment, and Gains-
borough attended it night after night, and could talk of
nothing else. One evening, when a storm at sea off the
2 A
370 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
coast near Naples was the subject of a peculiarly vivid
representation, a real thunderstorm broke over London,
to the terror of the superstitious among the audience,
who ran to the lobby protesting against the presumption
of De Loutherbourg for daring to imitate the mysteries
of nature. Meanwhile the inventor, accompanied by
Gainsborough and two or three other privileged friends,
ascended to the roof of the theatre, from whence they
could see the storm, and by looking down, witness at
the same time the mimic representation on the stage.
Gainsborough watched and Hstened intently for a few
moments, then turned excitedly to his friend. " De
Loutherbourg," he cried, " our thunder is the best ! "
He afterwards made a Httle theatre of his own, in
which he showed transparencies painted by himself, and
lighted at the back by candles. It is said that he ob-
tained excellent moonhght effects with his apparatus,
which was exhibited with his collected works at the
Grosvenor Gallery in 1885.
For the well-known anecdote about Mrs. Siddons
and her long nose I have found no earher authority
than 1816, when it appeared, perhaps for the first time,
in the Monthly Magazine. There it is given as told by
an artist, "a Mr. Scott, of North Britain," who had
painted a portrait of the actress. During the sitting
Mr. Scott remarked that he found the drawing of her
nose very difficult. " Ah ! " said Mrs. Siddons, " Gains-
borough was a good deal troubled in the same way.
He altered and varied the shape a long while, and at last
threw down the pencil, saying, ' Damn the nose — there's
no end to it.' " There appears to be no contemporary
reference to the equally familiar story told by Northcote,
about Reynolds at the Artists' Club speaking of Gains-
borough as the first landscape painter in Europe ; and
of Richard Wilson, who took the remark as a reflection
upon himself, adding, " Well, Sir Joshua, it is my opinion
that he is also the greatest portrait painter in Europe."
NOTES AND ANECDOTES 371
The story was, however, in circulation more than twenty
years before Northcote told it in 1814.
Numerous portraits of Gainsborough have made his
face famiHar to us, but of his figure and general bearing
we have no trustworthy description except that of
Thicknesse, who speaks of the painter's modest deport-
ment, and of " the elegance of his person." Fulcher's
frequently quoted statement that he was tall and fair
and well-proportioned was not written until 1855, sixty-
seven years after Gainsborough's death. It was prob-
ably based merely on the girlish recollections of the
same old lady at Sudbury who told Fulcher that she
remembered Gainsborough when he visited the town in
1784, wearing " a rich suit of drab, with laced ruffles and
a cocked hat." She described him as " gay, very gay, and
good-looking." But Gainsborough in spite of his gaiety
was a very shy man, and much addicted to blushing.
Although after his marriage Gainsborough seems to
have abandoned modelHng as a means of money-making
he practised the art in a desultory fashion throughout
his career. He made a small bust of the man who sat
for The Woodman which is said to have " exhibited all
the vigour of Vandyke." Thicknesse saw him model
and colour from memory a head of Mrs. Sheridan after
hearing her sing at a concert ; and another model of
Mrs. Sheridan's head was long in the possession of the
late C. R. Leslie, R.A. Both, unfortunately, were de-
stroyed by accident, and no example of Gainsborough's
modelling is known to exist to-day. If the recollections
of J. T. Smith can be trusted Gainsborough was an
ardent admirer of fine penmanship, to examine which
" pleased him beyond expression " ; but the story of
his obtaining excuses from school by forging his father's
hand is of doubtful authenticity. Smith heard it from
John Jackson, R.A., who never knew or even saw Gains-
borough, and was only ten years old when that artist
died.
CHAPTER XX
"THE BLUE BOY "
Of one famous picture, in some respects the most re-
markable of all Gainsborough's works, nothing appears
to have been said in print during the painter's lifetime,
or for some years after his death. I have found no men-
tion in any contemporary notes on Gainsborough of that
full-length portrait of a youth in a Vandyke dress known
as The Blue Boy, nor is it spoken of by Bate, Thicknesse,
or other writers of the painter's obituaries. The Blue
Boy, now in the collection of the Duke of Westminster,
has been the subject of endless discussions and conjec-
tures, but no one has ever been able to say with certainty
when it was painted, or whom it represents. Everything,
however, seems to connect the picture with a family of
ironmongers in Soho, named Buttall, in whose possession
it certainly was for some time. The earliest mention of
The Blue Boy, so far as I am aware, is in Jackson's essay
on Gainsborough, pubhshed ten years after the artist's
death, when it is spoken of as already famous. " Perhaps
his best portrait," says Jackson, " is that known among
the painters as The Blue Boy ; it was in the possession
of Mr. Buttall, near Newport Market." This was written
in January 1798, and another mention of the picture
is to be found in 1808 in the sketch of Gainsborough's
life by Edward Edwards, A.R.A., published in his Anec-
dotes of Painters. Edwards describes it as "a whole-
length portrait of a young gentleman in a Vandyke dress,
which picture obtained the title of The Blue Boy, from the
colour of the satin in which the figure is dressed. It is
not exaggerated praise to say that this figure might
stand among those of Vandyke. It is now in the pos-
372
THE BLUE BOY
By permission of the Duke of Westminster
"THE BLUE BOY" 373
session of Mr. Hoppner, R.A." Edwards adds in a foot-
note : " This was the portrait of a Master Buttall, whose
father was then a very considerable ironmonger in Greek
Street, Soho."
The Blue Boy is next heard of in 1814, at the Gains-
borough Exhibition at the British Institution. The pic-
ture was lent by Earl Grosvenor, who had purchased it
from Hoppner. The exhibition of The Blue Boy in 1814
was its first appearance in public, unless the theory be
accepted that it was sent by Gainsborough to the
Academy of 1770, as No. 85, Portrait of a Young Gen-
tleman. This theory is based on a letter written by Mary
Moser, R.A., in 1770, to Fuseli, who was then in Rome.
She speaks about the exhibition, and mentions, among
other matters, that " Gainsborough is beyond himself in
a portrait of a gentleman in a Vandyke habit." Another
ground for thinking that the 1770 portrait was The Blue
Boy is a conversation recorded by J. T. Smith in his
Book for a Rainy Day. Smith, writing in November,
1832, says that the old artist John Taylor, then in his
ninety-third year, had just called upon him, and gives a
note of the conversation that ensued.
Smith asked him if he knew Gainsborough. "Oh, I
remember him," said the old artist; "he was an odd
man at times. I recollect my master Hayman coming
home, after he had been to an exhibition, and saying what
an extraordinary picture Gainsborough had painted of
the Blue Boy ; it is as fine as Vandyke. Who was the
Blue Boy, Sir ? Why, he was an ironmonger, but why
so called I don't know. He lived at the comer of Greek
and King Streets, Soho, an immensely rich man."
Francis Hayman, R.A., under whom Taylor had studied,
died in 1776, and the only whole-length of a young
gentleman exhibited by Gainsborough before that year
was the portrait already mentioned. No. 85, in 1770. If
Taylor's memory is to be trusted, his statement is strongly
corroborative of Mary Moser's letter.
374 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
In the absence of any direct evidence, it seems not
unlikely that Gainsborough painted this masterpiece
before the spring of 1770, perhaps when Jonathan
Buttall, then a young man, was visiting Bath ; and that
the picture was exhibited at the Academy in that year,
and was noticed and admired by Mary Moser and Francis
Hayman, among others. It is possible, too, that it may
have been sent later to the Buttalls' house in Soho, and
remained there until some time after Gainsborough's
death, when its sale made its merits known to the larger
and more appreciative art public that had come into
existence since it was exhibited at the Academy twenty
years or more earlier. This, of course, is merely conjec-
tural, but it seems to be a possible explanation of the
singular fact that no writer mentions The Blue Boy
during the fourteen years of Gainsborough's residence in
London.
I have found some information about the picture in
a note in the European Magazine for August, 1798, seven
or eight months after Jackson's first mention of The Blue
Boy in his essay on Gainsborough. The following is the
paragraph in the European Magazine.
" Mr. Gainsborough.
" One of the finest pictures that this great artist ever
painted, and which might be put upon a par with any
portrait that ever was executed, is that of a boy in a
blue Vandyke dress, which is now in the possession of a
tradesman in Greek Street. Gainsborough had seen a
portrait of a boy by Titian for the first time, and having
found a model that pleased him he set to work mth all
the enthusiasm of his genius. 'I am proud,' he said,
' of being of the same profession with Titian, and was
resolved to attempt something like him.'
The explanation given in this paragraph of Gains-
borough's motive in painting a picture in which blue
predominates does not agree with the story of the origin
of The Blue Boy that has been current, and widely
" THE [BLUE BOY " 375
accepted, for the last ninety years or more — since John
Young, the engraver, wrote the first catalogue of the
pictures at Grosvenor House. In that catalogue, pub-
lished in 1 82 1, Young says of The Blue Boy :
" This picture was painted in consequence of a dis-
pute between Gainsborough, Sir Joshua Reynolds, and
several other artists. The former having asserted that
he thought the predominant colour in a picture ought
to be blue, the others were of opinion that it was not
possible to produce a fine picture on such a principle,
and the artist in consequence painted this portrait as an
illustration of his opinion. It was considered that he
had proved his assertion, and his performance, having
excited great attention and become a general theme of
praise with the artists of that day, tended much to
enhance the reputation he had already acquired."
The rights and wrongs of this supposed difference of
opinion between Reynolds and Gainsborough have been
the subject of many discussions between critics and
others who have wTitten about the two painters, but
after a careful examination of the evidence it appears
to me that there is nothing to dispute about. Young's
story, of which he offers no sort of proof, is probably
mythical, for not one of the earlier writers on Gains-
borough says anything about the matter ; and, as I
have already stated, the earliest known mention of The
Blue Boy is in 1798, ten years after Gainsborough's
death. Bate, who in the Morning Herald pitted Gains-
borough against Reynolds for years, says nothing in all
his voluminous notes about disputes concerning schemes
of colour, which he certainly would have done if, as
asserted, Gainsborough had triumphed. Edward Ed-
wards, A.R.A., is equally silent on the point in his life
of Gainsborough pubHshed in 1808. Edwards had been
an A.R.A. since 1772, and in close touch with the Royal
Academy all the time. If it were well known that Gains-
borough painted a picture to controvert the President,
and succeeded in doing so, Edwards could not have been
376 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
ignorant of the fact ; and in that case it is incredible
that he should have refrained from mentioning it, espe-
cially as he places The Blue Boy first in his list of Gains-
borough's pictures. J. T. Smith, the artist and writer,
who was acquainted with both the painters, was a diUgent
collector of gossip about Gainsborough. In his writings
he discusses The Blue Boy more than once, but without
any hint of the Reynolds incident. Nor does Allan
Cunningham make any reference to the dispute in his
life of Gainsborough published in 1829.
Young, in his note on The Blue Boy in the Grosvenor
House catalogue, says nothing about the theory that
Gainsborough painted the picture to disprove a well-
known passage in Sir Joshua's Discourses. The first sug-
gestion of this appears to have been made by John
Burnet, who is probably chiefly responsible for the wide
circulation of the legend that connects Gainsborough with
Reynolds in this matter. Burnet, the engraver of some
of W'ilkie's pictures, and an able writer on technical
subjects connected with art, pubUshed in 1827 his Prac-
tical Treatise on Painting, in which he challenges the rule
laid down by Sir Joshua that the masses of light in a
picture should be of a warm colour, and that only a small
proportion of the colder hues should be used to set off
and support the warm tones. After giving his reasons
for disagreeing with Sir Joshua, Burnet adds : "I be-
lieve Gainsborough painted the portrait of a boy dressed
in blue, now in the possession of Lord Grosvenor, to show
the fallacy of this doctrine." Burnet does not mention
Young's book or the existence of any general opinion on
the subject, but says, "I" believe, as if it were a new
idea of his own. His book had a large sale among artists
and students, and went through several editions.
Once started, the story soon became widespread.
Passavant mentions it in 1836 in his Tour of a German
Artist in England ; Mrs. Jameson elaborates it in her
Grosvenor House catalogue of 1844 ; and Waagen in
"THE BLUE BOY" 377
1848 follows Mrs. Jameson. It reappears in 1854 in the
Handbook for Young Painters, where C. R. Leslie writes :
" Gainsborough, it is said, painted his portrait of a
boy in a blue dress by way of refuting the objection Sir
Joshua made to hght blue as a large mass. But I agree
with the opinion of Sir Thomas Lawrence, that in this
picture the difficulty is ' ably combated ' rather than
vanquished."
Leslie's introduction of the opinion of Lawrence, who
was by way of being a contemporary of Gainsborough,
gives to the legend an air of antiquity that is altogether
fictitious. Lawrence's opinion was not given until 1829,
at the very end of his life, and only then in connection
with the book in which the story appears to have origi-
nated. Lawrence, writing to Burnet about the Practical
Treatise on Painting, says :
" Agreeing with you in so many points, I still venture
to differ from you in your question with Sir Joshua.
Infinitely various as Nature is there are still two or
three truths that limit her variety, or rather that limit
Art in the imitation of her. I should instance for one
the ascendancy of white objects, which can never be
departed from with impunity, and again the union of
colour with light. Masterly as the execution of that
picture is, I always feel a never-changing impression on
my eye that the Blue Boy of Gainsborough is a difficulty
boldly combated, not conquered."
It is clear that this letter of Lawrence's refers only
to the individual opinion of Burnet on the dictum, of
Sir Joshua.
Jonathan Buttall, the supposed original of the pic-
ture of The Blii^ Boy, succeeded his father in the iron-
monger's business carried on at the comer of Greek
Street and King Street, Soho, and apparently conducted
it until 1796, when his stock-in-trade and a quantity of
other property were sold by Sharpe & Coxe, the auc-
tioneers. The property sold included " a valuable collec-
tion of Gainsborough's drawings, a few capital pictures
378 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
by Gainsborough, Gainsborough Dupont, and others, a
small library of books, judiciously selected, books of
music and several musical instruments, and about a
hundred and sixty dozen of choice old red port." The
pictures and musical instruments suggest a community
of tastes with Gainsborough, with whom Buttall seems
to have been on intimate terms. It has not, I think,
been remarked by Gainsborough's biographers that
Buttall was one of the " few of those friends he most
respected," whom the painter desired should attend his
funeral at Kew. Buttall had property at Ipswich, where
Gainsborough lived in his youth, and it is possible that
their acquaintance was of long standing. The iron-
monger survived the artist for more than seventeen
years. He died towards the close of 1805, and the
Morning Herald of December 2nd contains the following
announcement : " Died on Friday last, at his house in
Oxford Street, Jonathan Buttall, Esq., a gentleman whose
amiable manners and good disposition will cause him
to be ever regretted by his friends."
APPENDIX A
TWELVE LETTERS FROM GAINSBOROUGH
TO WILLIAM JACKSON OF EXETER
Noiv in the Possession of the Royal Academy of Arts
I
Bath, Aug. 23,
My dear Jackson, — Will it — (damn this pen) — will
it serve as any apology for not answering your last
obliging letter to inform you that I did not receive it of
near a month after it arrived, shut up in a music-book
at Mr. Palmer's. I admire your notions of most things,
and do agree with you that there might be exceeding
pretty pictures painted of the kind you mention. But
are you sure you don't mean instead of the flight into
Egypt, my flight out of Bath ! Do you consider, my dear
maggotty sir, what a deal of work history pictures
require to what little dirty subjects of coal horses and
jackasses and such figures as I fill up with ; no, you
don't consider anything about that part of the story ;
you design faster than any man or any thousand men
could execute. There is but one flight I should like
to paint, and that's yours out of Exeter, for while your
numerous and polite acquaintance encourage you to
talk so cleverly, we shall have but few productions, real
and substantial productions. But to be serious (as I
know you love to be), do you really think that a regular
composition in the Landskip way should ever be filled
with History, or any figures but such as fill a place (I
won't say stop a gap) or create a little business for the
eye to be drawTi from the trees in order to return to
them with more glee. I did not know that you admired
those tragic-comic pictures, because some have thought
that a regular History Picture may have too much back-
ground, and the composition be hurt by not considering
379
38o THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
what ought to be principal. But 1 talk now like old
square-toes. There is no rule of that kind, say you.
But then, says I,
Damme you lie !
If I had but room and time before Palmer seals up his
packet, I'd trim you. I have been riding out with him
this morning. I wish I had been with him in Devonshire.
—Adieu, T. G.
II
My dear Jackson, — To show you that I can be as
quick as yourself, tho : I shall never be half a quarter
so clever, I am answering your letter the very moment
I received if from Mr. Palmer. I shall not tease you
upon the subject of the flight, as we are now upon a
better and that which above all others I have long wished
to touch upon, because tho : I'm a rogue in talking
upon Painting and love to seem to take things wrong,
I can be both serious and honest upon any subjects
thoroughly pleasing to me ; and such will ever be those
wherein your happiness and our friendship are concerned,
let me then throw aside that damned grinning trick of
mine for a moment, and be as serious and stupid as a
Horse. j\Iark then, that ever since I have been quite
clear in your being a real genius, so long have I been of
opinion that you are dayly throwing away your gift upon
Gentlemen, and only studying how you shall become the
Gentleman too, now, damn gentlemen, there is not such
a set of enemies to a real artist in the world as they are
if not kept at a proper distance.
They think (and so may you for a while) that they
reward your merit by their Company and notice ; but I,
who blow away all the chaff, and, by G — , in their eyes
too if they don't stand clear, know that they have but
one part worth looking at, and that is their Purse ; their
Hearts are seldom near enough the right place to get a
sight of it. If any gentlemen come to my house my
man asks them if they want me (provided they don't
seem satisfied with seeing the pictures), and then he asks
what they would please to want with me ; if they say
a picture. Sir, please to walk this way and my master
will speak to you ; but if they only want me to bow and
compliment — Sir, my master is walk'd out — and so, my
APPENDIX A 383
dear, there I nick them. Now, if a Lady, a handsome
Lady, comes, 'tis as much as his hfe is worth to send her
away so. But this is to ... as you knew this
before . . . [the letter is torn here] I wish you Hved a
Uttle nearer so that I could see you often, or a good
deal nearer if you please. I have no acquaintance now,
nor will I till I can say within myself / approve my choice.
There are very few clever fellows worth hanging — and
that consideration makes you the more worthy.— Adieu
for want of room, I'll write again very soon.
T. G.
Bath. Sept. 2, 1767.
Ill
Bath, Sept. 14th.
My dear Jackson, — Now you seem to lay too much
stress upon me, and show yourself to be a serious fellow.
I question if you could splice all my letters together
whether you would find more connection and sense in
them than in many landskips joined, where half a tree
was to meet half a church to make a principal object.
I should not think of my pretending to reproach you
who are a regular system of philosophy, a reasonable
creature, and a particular fellow. If I meant anything
(which God knows if I did) it was this, that many a real
genius is lost in the fictitious character of the gentleman ;
and that, as many of those creatures are continually
courting you, possibly you might forget what I, without
any merit to myself, remember from meer shyness,
namely, that they make no part of the artist. Depend
upon it, Jackson, you have more sense in your little finger
than I have in my whole Body and Head ; I am the
most inconsistent, changeable being, so full of fits and
starts, that if you mind what I say, it will be shuttmg
your eyes to some purpose. I am only sensible of mean-
ing, and of having once said, that I wished you lived nearer
to me ; but that this wish does not proceed from a selfish-
ness rather than any desire of correcting any step of
yours I much doubt. Perhaps you can see that, though
I can not. I might add perhaps in my red-hot way, that
damme Exeter is no more a place for a Jackson than
Sudbury in Suffolk is for a G. ! But all the rest you know
better than I can tell you, I'm certain. ... I look upon
this letter as one of my most agreeable performances, so
382 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
don't let's have any of your airs. I could say a deal
more, but what can a man say pent up in a corner thus.
. . . Yours.
T. g:^
This letter is not addressed to " Mr. WilHam Jackson,"
as all the others are, but to " William Shakespeare
Jackson, Esq."
IV
Dear Jackson, — Is it true that you broke your neck
in going home ? I have not seen Palmer, but only the
day after your departure to learn the truth. It is a cur-
rent report here that the great and the amiable Mr.
Jackson got a mischief in going home, that you had
tied your horse by the head so fast that his head was
dragged off in going down a hill, and that you ordered
the driver (like a near-sighted man) to go back for the
horse's body, and that the chaise horses frightened at
the sight of the boy's riding up upon a horse without a
head took fright and made for Exeter. And that you,
unwilling to leave your horse in that condition, took a
flying leap out at the window and pitched head foremost
into a hollow tree. Miss D — 1 has heard this story, and
says if it be true she'll never touch a Note again. I
hope to hear from either Palmer or Bearing when I see
them some more favourable account of you. I'm but
little disposed to pity you, because you slipp't away so
d — d sly, without giving me any more time than you
had to jump into the hollow tree. Pray, if your d — d
long fingers escaped, let's hear from you soon, and in the
meantime I'll pray that it's all a lie, &c.
Bath, Feb. 6th.
Will you meet me at London any time, and I'll order
business accordingly.
V
Dear Jackson, — If your neck is but safe damn your
horse's head. I am so pleased with both your remarks,
and your indigo, that I know not which to admire most,
or which to think of most immediate use ; the indigo
you leave me in doubt whether there be any more to
be got, whereas I am pretty sure of some more of your
APPENDIX A 383
thoughts now we are fairly settled into a correspondence ;
your observations are like all yours, just, natural, and
not common ; your indigo is cleare, like your under-
standing, and pure as your music, not to say exactly of
the same blue as that Heaven from whence all your ideas
are reflected ! To say the truth of your indigo, 'tis de-
lightful, so look sharp for some more (and I'll send you
a drawing), and for your thoughts, I have often flattered
myself I was just going to think so. The lugging in
objects, whether agreeable to the whole or not, is a sign
of the least genius of anything, for a person able to
collect in the mind, will certainly groupe in the mind
also ; and if he cannot master a number of objects so as
to introduce them in friendship, let him do but a few,
and that you know, my Boy, makes simplicity. One
part of a picture ought to be like the first part of a tune,
that you guess what follows, and that makes the second
part of the tune, and so I'm done — My respects to Mr.
Tremlett. Bearing did not call upon me. I hear he's
gone from Bath.
The harp is packed up to come to you, and you shall
take it out with Miss , as I shall not take anything
for it but give (it) to you to twang upon. . . .
VI
My dear Jackson, — I will suppose all you say about
my exhibition Pictures to be true, because I have not time
to dispute it with you. I am much obliged to you and
wish I could spend a few days with you in town. But
I have begun a large picture of Tommy Linley and his
sister, and cannot come. I suppose you know the Boy
is bound for Italy the first opportunity. Pray do you
remember carrying me to a picture-dealer's somewhere
by Hanover Square, and my being struck with the leaving
and touch of a little bit of tree ; the whole picture was
not above 8 or 10 inches high and about a foot long.
I wish if you had time that you'd inquire what it might
be purchased for and give me one hne more whilst you
stay in town.
If you can come this way home one may enjoy a day
or two of your company. I shall be heartily glad. I
can always make up one bed for a friend without any
384 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
trouble, and nobody has a better claim to that title, or
a better title to that claim than yourself. — Believe me,
dear Jackson, yours most sincerely ;
Thos. Gainsborough.
May nth, J 768.
My comphments attend all inquiring friends, and
damn this pen.
VII
Bath, Sept. 2nd.
My dear Jackson, — I should have wrote to you
sooner, but have been strangely hurried since I left
Exeter. In my way home I met with Lord Shelborne,
who insisted on my making him a short visit, and I
don't repent going (tho' I generally do, to all Lords'
houses) as I met with Mr. Dunning there. There is
something exclusive of the clear and deep understand-
ing of that gentleman most exceedingly pleasing to me.
He seems the only man who talks as Giardini plays, if
you know what I mean ; he puts no more motion than
what goes to the real performance, which constitutes that
ease and gentility peculiar to damned clever fellows,
each in their way. I observe his forehead jets out, and
mine runs back a good deal more than common, which
accounts for some difference betwixt our parts. No
doubt with me but that he has an uncommon share of
brains, and those disposed to overlook all the rest of his
parts, let them be ever so powerful. He is an amazing
compact man in every respect, and as we get a sight of
everything by comparison, only think of the difference
betwixt Mr. Dunning almost motionless, with a mind
brandishing hke lightning from corner to corner of the
earth, whilst a long cross-made fellow only flings his
arms about like thrashing flails without half an idea of
what he would be at — and besides this neatness in out-
ward appearance, his storeroom seems cleared of all
French ornaments and gingerbread work, everything is
simpHcity and elegance and in its proper place, no dis-
order or confusion in the furniture, as if he was going to
remove. Sober sense and great acuteness are marked
very strong in his face, but if those were all I should
only admire him as a great lawyer, but there is genius
APPENDIX A 385
(in our sense of the word). (It) shines in all he says.
In short, Mr. Jackson of Exeter, I begin to think there
is something in the air of Devonshire that grows clever
fellows. I could name four or five of you, superior to
the product of any other county in England.
Pray make my compliments to one Lady who is neat
about the mouth, if you can guess, and beUeve me most
faithfully yours, Tho. Gainsborough.
VIII
My dear Jackson, — I am much obliged to you for
your last letter, and the lessons reed, before. I think I
now begin to see a little into the nature of modulation
and the introduction of flats and sharps ; and when we
meet you shall hear me play extempore. My friend
Abel has been to visit me, but he made but a short stay,
being obhged to go to Paris for a month or six weeks,
after which he has promised to come again. There never
was a poor devil so fond of harmony with so little know-
ledge of it, so that what you have done is pure charity.
I dined with :Mr. Duntze in expectation (and indeed full
assurance) of hearing your scholar Miss Flond play
a httle, but was for the second time flung. ... I'm sick
of Portraits and wish very much to take my viol-da-
gamba and walk off to some sweet village, where I can
paint landskips and enjoy the fag-end of life in quietness
and ease. But these fine ladies and their tea-drinkings,
dancings, husband-huntings, &c, &c. &c., will fob me out
of the last ten years, and I fear miss getting husbands
too. But we can say nothing to these things you know,
Jackson, we must jogg on and be content with the
jingling of the bells, only, d— it I hate a dust, the
kicking up a dust, and being confined in harness to follow
the track whilst others ride in the waggon, under cover,
stretching their legs in the straw at ease, and gazing a.t
green trees and blue skies without half my Taste. That's
d d hard. My comfort is I have five viols-da-gamba,
three J ayes and two Barak Normans. — Adieu,
Tho. Gainsborough.
Bath, June 4th.
[J aye and Barak Norman were well-known makers
of musical instruments.]
2 B
386 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
IX
Dear Jackson, — Methinks I hear you say all friend-
ship is my and all sincerity my , only because
I have not had time since my hurry of finishing two full-
lengths and a landskip for the exhibition, to answer your
two last letters. But don't be in a hurry to determine
anything about me ; if you are, ten to one you are
wrong, those who can claim a longer acquaintance with
me than Mr. Jackson knowing at this moment but very
little of my real temper. I'm heartily sorry that you
don't come to reside near Bath, as you expected, not
because you are disappointed of the advantage of con-
versing with me and my works, but because I am deprived
of the much greater advantages of sucking your sensible
skull, and of the opportunity I might possibly have of
convincing you how much I shall always esteem your
various and extensive talents, not to mention what I
think still better worth mentioning, namely, your honesty
and undesigning plainness and openness of soul. They
say your mind is not worldly — no, said I, because its
heavenly. . . . I think a tollerable reason. Master Matthews.
I fear, my lad, I shall have it this exhibition, for never
was such slight dabs presented to the eyes of a million.
But I grow dauntless out of mere stupidity as I grow
old, and I believe that any one who plods on in any one
way, especially if that one way will bring him bread and
cheese as well as a better, will grow the same
Mr. Palmer was going to London the last time I saw him,
so I fear it may be some time before you receive this
letter, but as soon as you can, do show how well you can
forgive by a speedy answer. Thanks for the indigo — a
little of it goes a great way, which is lucky. — Adieu.
Dear Jackson, — I will confess to you that I think
it unpardonable in me not to speak seriously upon a
subject of so much consequence as that which has em-
ployed us of late ; therefore you shall have my thoughts
without any humming, swearing, or affectation of wit.
Indeed, my affection for you would naturally have led
me that way before now, but that I am soon lost if I
APPENDIX A 387
pretend to reasoning ; and you being all regularity and
judgment, I own provoke me the more to break loose,
as he who cannot be correct is apt to direct the eye
with a little freedom of handling ; but no more of it. I
must own your calculations and comparison betwixt our
different professions to be just, provided you remember
that in mine a man may do great things and starve in a
garret if he does not conquer his passions and conform
to the common eye in chusing that branch which they
will encourage and pay for. Now there cannot be that
difference between music and painting unless you suppose
that the musician voluntarily shuns the only profitable
branch, and will be a chamber counsel when he might
appear at the bar. You see, sir, I'm out of my subject
already. But now in again. If music vAW not satisfy you
without a certainty (which by the by is nonsense, begging
your pardon, for there is no such thing in any profession),
then I say be a painter. You have more of the painter
than half those who get money by it, that I will swear,
if you desire it, upon a Church Bible. You want a httle
drawing and the use of pencil and colours, which I could
put into your hands in one month, without meddling
with your head ; I propose to let that alone, if you'll
let mine off easy. There is a branch of Painting next in
profit to portrait, and quite in your power without any
more drawing than I'll answer for your having, which is
Drapery and Landskip backgrounds. Perhaps you don't
know that whilst a face painter is harassed to death the
drapery painter sits and earns five or six hundred a
year, and laughs all the while. Your next will be to tell
me what I know as well as yourself, viz., that I am an
impertinent coxcomb. This I know, and will speak out
if you kill me for it, you are too modest, too diffident, too
sensible, and too honest ever to push in music— Sincerely,
T. G.
XI
Dear Jackson,— I thought you was sick as I had not
seen you for some days and last night when I went to
the play in the hopes of seeing you there Mr. Palmer
confirmed my fears ; I fully intended putting on my
thick shoes this morning, but have been hindered by
388 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
some Painter Plagues ; pray send me word whether there
is any occasion for Dr. Moysey to come to you in Palmer's
opinion : damn your own, for you are too much Hke me
to know how it is with you. The Doctor shall come in a
moment if there is the least occasion, and I know he will
with pleasure without your hand touching your breeches
pocket. I'll be with you soon to feel your pulse myself.
— So God mend you.
T. Gainsborough.
Tuesday morning.
I have spoilt a fine piece of drawing paper because
I had no other at hand, and in a hurry to know how
you are.
[This letter is written on a good-sized piece of drawing
paper.]
XII
Jan. 25, 1777.
Dear Jackson, — I suppose I never drew a portrait half
so like the sitter as my silence since the receipt of your
last resembles neglect and ingratitude, owing to two of
the crossest accidents that ever attended a poor fiddler.
First and most unfortunately, I have been four times
after Bach, and have never laid eyes on him ; and
secondly and most provokingly, I have had a parcel
made up of two drawings and a box of pencils, such as
you wrote for, ever since the day after I received your
favour enclosing the Tenths, and directed for you to go
by the Exeter coach, which has laid in my room by the
neglect of two blockheads, one my nephew, who is too
proud to carry a bundle under his arm, though his betters,
the journeymen-Tailors, always carry their foul shirts so ;
and my d- cowardly footman, who forsooth is afraid
to peep into the street for fear of being pressed for sea
service, the only service God Almighty made him for ;
so that, my dear Jackson, if it was not for your being
endowed with Jobe's patience I should think myself
deservedly for ever shut out of your favour ; but surely
I shall catch Bach soon to get you an answer to your
letter, and for the drawings if I don't carry them myself
to the inn to-morrow ! There is a letter of nonsense
enclosed with the drawings to plague you once more
APPENDIX A 389
about 6ths and loths which you may read as you hap
to be in humour when you see the drawings. Till then
I'm sure you can't bear the sight of my odious hand, so no
more at present as the saying is, but yours sincerely,
T. G.
Pall Mall.
You hear, I suppose, that all Lords and Members
have given up their privilege of franking to ease the
Taxes. I'm sorry for it.
APPENDIX B
Gainsborough at Bath
Some valuable information about the earlier period
of Gainsborough's Hfe at Bath is contained in a frag-
ment of unpublished autobiographical memoir by Ozias
Humphry, R.A., in the possession of the Royal Academy.
Humphry from 1760 to 1764 lodged at Bath in the house
of Thomas Linley the musician, father of the beautiful
and gifted girl who was afterwards married to Richard
Brinsley Sheridan. " Mr. Gainsborough," says Humphry,
"who was passionately fond of music as well as paint-
ing, lived in great intimacy with this family and never
failed to communicate useful hints or good general in-
struction." The hints and instruction were given in
connection with the musical education of little Tom
Linley, who died before the promise of his boyhood was
fulfilled ; to the regret of Mozart, who declared that
" had Linley lived he would have been one of the greatest
ornaments of the musical world."
Humphry, who at this time was but a youth, fre-
quently accompanied Gainsborough in his summer after-
noon rambles in the country round Bath; "to which
and succeeding excursions the public are indebted for
the greater part of the sketches and more finished draw-
ings from time to time produced by that whimsical, in-
genious, but very deserving artist. Mr. Gainsborough
painted during these years several landscapes of extra-
ordinary merit that were mostly executed by candle light,
to which he was much accustomed." Gainsborough's
favourite sketching localities near Bath are said by
another contemporary to have been the woods at Claver-
ton and Warley, where he frequently passed the day with
only a sandwich or some bread and cheese in his pocket.
The notes by Humphry on costume in its connection
with the resemblance of Gainsborough's portraits to his
sitters should be compared with the great painter's own
390
APPENDIX B 391
remarks on the subject contained in his letters to Lord
Dartmouth, in Chapter IV. " In Bath," writes Humphry,
" his general practice was in portraiture, in which he had
peculiar excellence and frequently produced pictures of
surprising resemblance and perfection. Likeness alone
was all he avowed to aim at ; from this concentration
it must often have happened that although his pictures
were exactly like and to the parties for whom they were
painted, and their families, highly satisfactory at the
time whilst the prevailing modes were daily seen and the
friends approved and beloved in them, yet the satis-
faction arising from this resemblance was lessening daily
as the fleeting fashions varied, and were changing from
time to time. The portrait of Mr. Quin (see p. 38) was
painted about this period, and was of uncommon force
and vigour, with a truth and animation beyond Mr.
Gainsborough's usual performance. As the original had
bold and expressive features, and was singularly cal-
culated for representation, few pictures have ever been
more popular or maintained their credit with less decad-
ency upon the minds of beholders. This portrait was
painted within a few months of the great actor's death,
so that his dress and general appearance never varied
from the time it was completed, and is therefore an
exception to the above observation."
But the most important of Humphry's comments on
Gainsborough is a description of his methods of por-
traiture, and especially of his practice of painting in a
subdued light in the earlier stages. Other contemporaries
have mentioned this habit of working in semi-darkness,
but Humphry's description is far more valuable not
only because it is fuller, but because it is written by a
painter, who could understand Gainsborough's object
and intentions better than any layman.
" Exact resemblance in his portraits," writes Humphry,
" as has already been said, was Mr. Gainsborough's
constant aim, to which he invariably adhered. These
pictures, as well as his landscapes, were frequently
wrought by candle-Hght, and generally with great force
and Hkeness. But his painting room — even by day a
kind of darkened twilight — had scarcely any light, and
I have seen him, whilst his subjects have been sitting to
him, when neither they nor the pictures were scarcely
discernible.
392 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
"If the canvases were of three-quarter size he did not
desire they should be loosened upon the straining frames,
but if they were half lengths or whole lengths he never
failed to paint with the canvas loose, secured by small
cords, and brought to the extremity of the frame, and
having previously determined and marked with chalk
upon what part of the canvas the face was to be painted
it was so placed upon the easel as to be close to the
subject he was painting ; which gave him an opportunity
(as he commonly painted standing) of comparing the
dimensions and effect of the copy with the original,
both near and at a distance. By this method, with
incessant study and exertion, he acquired the power of
giving the masses and general forms of his models with
the utmost exactness. Having thus settled the ground-
work of his portraits he let in (of necessity) more light
for the finishing of them ; but his correct preparation
was of the last importance and enabled him to secure
the proportions of his features, as well as the general
contour of objects, with uncommon truth."
Humphry's explanation of Gainsborough's reason for
painting on a loose canvas is not well expressed, but to
me it seems that the artist wished for the sake of con-
stant comparison to work with his painted head as nearly
as possible side by side with the original. If the canvas
were a small one (what he calls a three-quarters, and we
call a head-size) this would be easy. But in working on
a large scale such as a half or whole length a considerable
space of canvas would separate the living from the
painted head. Gainsborough therefore, having, as
Humphry says, marked with chalk the position of the
head, had the canvas released from the stretcher and
fastened temporarily by strings at the back. He could
then if he wished pull the canvas over until the space
intended for the head was close to the edge of the
stretcher, and as near as possible to the face of the sitter.
William Pearce
Gainsborough's letters show that he was on the most
intimate terms with a certain William Pearce whose
identity has hitherto been a matter of speculation. Sir
Walter Armstrong and F. G. Stephens describe him as a
doctor, of Bath, but no proof of this is to be found in
APPENDIX B 393
Gainsborough's correspondence. In the well-known letter
(p. 210) about a projected visit to the Lakes with Kilder-
bee, the expression " your Grays and Dr. Brownes " seems
to indicate that the painter was writing to some kind of
poet or hterary man ; and the brief note written by
Gainsborough in his last illness suggests that Pearce
resided in London, or at all events not at Bath :
" My dear Pearce, — I am extremely obHged to you
and Mrs. Pearce for your kind inquiries ; I hope I am
now getting better, as the swelling is considerably in-
creased and more painful. We have just received some
cheeses from Bath, and beg the favour of you to accept
two of them. — My dear Pearce, ever yours sincerely,
" Thomas Gainsborough."
The William Pearce who corresponded with Gains-
borough was, I believe, an amateur of literary tastes who
wrote the libretto for several comic operas that were
produced at Covent Garden in the later years of the
eighteenth century. Ke was intimate with Henry Bate,
and was the writer of the verses (p. 289) eulogising the
hospitahty of the parson-editor at Bradwell, where per-
haps he and Gainsborough were at times fellow-guests.
When Gainsborough's portrait of William Pearce was
exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery, in 1885, its owner,
Mr. J. Rubens Powell, stated that he bought it of a Mr.
Luck, who was the son-in-law of William Pearce. Mr.
Powell learned, apparently from Luck, that the portrait
was painted as a wedding present for Pearce, who lived
to be over ninety ; and I think there can be little doubt
that he was the William Pearce whose death is thus
announced in the Gentleman's Magazine of April, 1842 :
— " In Cadogan Place, Chelsea, aged 91, WilUam Pearce,
Esq., for a number of years Chief Clerk of the Admiralty ;
formerly a frequent Correspondent of this Magazine."
There is a letter at the British Museum from this
Wilham Pearce which connects him with Gainsborough.
It is dated Cadogan Place, March 22, 1824, and addressed
to George Chalmers, Secretary to the Board of Trade,
who had apparently asked Pearce (on behalf of a Mr.
Erskine) to give him a characteristic letter of Gains-
borough's for some purpose with which George the Fourth
was connected. Pearce writes : " The letter I have
394 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
sent to him of the late Mr. Gainsborough is one most
appropriate, as it relates to a transaction with his Majesty
when Prince of Wales, and when the royal eye traverses
the pages (which I judge he will) he will be struck with
it." During the past half century two or three paintings
or drawings sold at Christie's have been described in each
case as '' presented by the artist to W. Pearce, who gave
it to the Right Hon. J. W. Croker." Croker was Secretary
to the Admiralty at the time that Pearce was Chief Clerk.
One of the works thus sold at Christie's became the
property of Lord Leighton, whose favourite artist was
Gainsborough. At Leighton's sale in 1896 it was bought
for /304 by Messrs. Agnew, for Mr. George Salting, who
bequeathed it to the British Museum. Pearce's portrait
by Gainsborough, mentioned above, was exhibited in
June, 1915, at Messrs. Agnew's gallery. The writer
whose name Gainsborough couples with that of Gray
the poet was probably Dr. John Brown, a long letter
by whom extolling the picturesque charms of Derwent-
water, printed in the Monthly Ledger in 1775, may have
been seen by Gainsborough.
"The Mall, St. James's Park"
On p. 349 it is stated that this famous picture (now the
property of Sir Audley Xeeld) was sold at Christie's with
the Kilderbee collection in 1829 ; and with this sale
originated the generally accepted belief that The Mall
was the property of Gainsborough's Ipswich friend,
Samuel Kilderbee. But there is nothing to show that
the picture was ever in Samuel Kilderbee's possession,
and there is direct evidence that it was owned by his
fellow-townsman, the artist George Frost. Thomas
Green of Ipswich records in his diary that in 1809 he was
taken by Colonel Dupuis to see Samuel Kilderbee's
pictures, and he notes that they included " three fine
landscapes by Gainsborough, the Rubens of English
landscape painters." He says nothing about The Mall
in connection with Kilderbee, but when he called on
George Frost eleven years later (October 16, 1820), he
found the old artist engaged in " copying his large
Gainsborough, the Mall of St. James's Park." Green
did not much like The Mall, which he seems to have seen
for the first time on this occasion, and describes it as
APPENDIX B 395
" an airy but flimsy production, evincing much dexterity
and skill in colouring, but still not a picture." He also
expresses the opinion that Gainsborough has proved the
ruin of Frost as an artist.
George Frost died in 182 1, a few months after Green's
visit to his studio, and in a lengthy obituary note in the
Ge7itleman's Magazine he is said to have owned The Mall
and other works by Gainsborough, "which will now be
sold." Apparently the}^ were disposed of privately, as
there were no Gainsboroughs among the pictures belong-
ing to Frost's widow when her property was sold after
her death a few years later. A catalogue of the sale
is in the possession of Mr. Frank Brown, of Ipswich, the
author of a valuable illustrated monograph of George
Frost. Mr. Brown's grandmother bought at Mrs. Frost's
sale the copy of The Mall that Green saw in progress.
It is still owned by the family, and is identical in detail
with Sir Audley Neeld's picture, but bluer in its general
tone. Mr. Brown tells me that there is an old local
tradition that the ladies who figure in the picture are
portraits of typical Suffolk beauties. It is possible that
The Mall was sold by Frost's widow to Samuel Kilderbee's
son ; or to his grandson, S. H. Kilderbee, who was the
seller of the pictures at Christie's in 1829. It could not
have been acquired by Samuel Kilderbee himself, as he
died in 1813.
Gainsborough Dupont's Studio
An interesting glimpse of Dupont's studio is given by
O'Keefe in his Recollections. It shows that Dupont, who
imitated his uncle's manner in painting as exactly as he
could, also shared his liking for working by artificial
light. O'Keefe writes : " About this time (1794) my
old friend Quick took me to see Gainsborough Dupont
the portrait painter, at his house. Mr. Harris had
employed him to paint, for himself, the principal per-
formers at Covent Garden theatre in their most distin-
guished characters. In the front room were many
portraits in different states of forwardness. The Right
Hon. William Pitt was on the easel ; Governor Hastings
standing on the floor ; and against the wall Quick in
' Spado,' with his little pistol — which he calls his barrel-
organ — in his hand. On the door of the back drawing-
396 THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
room opening I was surprised, and not a little shocked
to see the room darkened (dayhght shut out) ; and
lighted by a large lamp hanging from the centre of the
ceiling there stood a man half-naked, a ghastly figure
with a blanket round him, staring wildly and holding a
pole in his outstretched hand. This was Holman in the
character of Edgar (Mad Tom) ; Gainsborough Dupont
was painting him. I heard it was the custom of Dupont
to paint much by lamphght."
PlETRO FrANXESCO MoLA
The admiration of Gainsborough for this artist has
not, I think, been noticed by any of the biographers of
the English painter, but that it was considerable is
evident by a note written by Desenfans, who claimed
" to have lived in the strictest habit of friendship until
his expiring moments " with Gainsborough, and was
certainly most intimate with him. " Gainsborough,"
says Desenfans, " was never in Italy, and to atone in
some measure for the injury which that negligence might
prove to him, he was in the habit of borrowing, and
sometimes purchasing, works of that school as objects of
study. One day, finding him attentively examining the
fine picture of Mola that represents Jupiter and Lcda,
from which it was \\ith difficulty he could be parted, we
inquired what it was that so particularly caught his
attention. ' It is this manner of painting,' rephed the
modest artist, ' which I shall never attain, for Mola
appears to have made it his own by patent.' " The
tradition that Gainsborough was influenced by Mola
appears to have died out, but it was mentioned sixty
years ago by a writer in the Art Journal, who, in com-
menting on the pictures in the Bicknell collection by
Gainsborough, says, " He was such an admirer of Mola
that he frequently painted with a picture of that master
placed near him."
The Inxorporated Society of Artists
Gainsborough, as stated on p. 44, was elected a Fellow
of the Incorporated Society of Artists of Great Britain
in March, 1765, and he contributed regularly to its
exhibitions for several years. At the annual meeting
APPENDIX B 397
on October i8, 1768, he was elected to a Directorship of
the Society, and on the same day his old Ipswich friend,
Joshua Kirby, was made President. Gainsborough, how-
ever, declined to accept ofhce, and his letter of refusal
must have grieved Kirby deeply. The letter, addressed
to " Joshua Kirby, Esq., to be left at the Turk's Head,
Gerrard Street, St. Ann's, London," is as follows :
" Mr. President and Gentlemen, Directors of the
Society of Artists of Great Britain.
" I thank ye for the honour done me in appointing me
one of your Directors, but for a particular reason I beg
leave to resign, and am. Gentlemen, your most obliged
and obedient Humble Servant,
"Thos Gainsborough.
" Bath, Dec. 5, 1768."
The " particular reason " mentioned was no doubt
the invitation from Reynolds to join the Royal Academy,
then in course of formation. In January, 1769, Wright
of Derby was elected to the place among the Directors
made vacant by the resignation of Gainsborough, who
was nevertheless still regarded as a Fellow of the Society.
Both he and Reynolds were formally expelled from it
on the 6th of June, 1769, for breaking the rules by con-
tributing to the first exhibition of the Royal Academy.
INDEX
Abdy, Captain, 179
Abel, Karl Friedrich, influence
of his music on Gainsborough,
366; mentioned, 98, 114, 118,
120, 282, 360, 361, 362 ; see also
Portraits
Academy, Royal, the, buys
Gainsborough's letters to
William Jackson, 57 ; founda-
tion of, 65 ; first exhibition,
66 ; Diploma Gallery, 66, 295 ;
Gainsborough's Diploma, 350 ;
Observations on the Pictures now
Exhibiting at (1771), 76; first
exhibition at Somerset House,
166 ; A Candid Review of the
Exhibition, 167 ; catalogues of
166-172 ; Winter Exhibitions
(Old Masters), 36, 67, 185, 231,
265, 266, 267, 293, 328 ; minia-
tures at, 206 ; the " established
line," 216, 217; proposed
rival exhibition, 217; Gains-
borough's portrait at, 295 ; he
proposes to paint picture for
Council Room, 295 ; attacked
by Bate, 316 ; offers to buy
Gainsborough's picture, 327 ;
Gainsborough's penknife, 351 ;
Ozias Humphry's manuscripts
at, 390
Academy of Arts, St. Martin's
Lane, 6, 7
Acton, 352, 353
Adair, Mr., 339
Adolphus, Prince, practical joke
on Fischer, 164
Agnew & Sons, Messrs. Thomas,
77,200, 255, 394
Agnew, Mr. Morland, 78
— Sir William, 132, 267
Ailesbury, Lord, 326
Aldborough, Earl of (Lord Baltin-
glass), 141
Alexander, Mr. W. C, 348
Allen, Ralph, 67
Althorp, 38, 199
Ancaster, Duke of, 273
Anderdon, J. H., Royal Academy
catalogues, 40, 70
Angelo, Henry, 80, 128, 352, 364
Anstey, Christopher, 58
Anstruther, General, 361;
— Sir Ralph, of Balcaskie, 365
Armstrong, Sir Walter, 32, 71, 78,
115, 251, 392
Art Journal, 283, 396
Art Union, 247, 312
Artists, Free Society of, 59, 115,
207
Artists, Incorporated Society of.
Spring Gardens, 2,7, 43, 44, 59,
65 ; Gainsborough's letter of
resignation from, 397
Artists' Repository, 206
Arts, the Society of, commissions
Gainsborough to paint a por-
trait of Lord Folkestone, 124;
mentioned, 105, no, 125, 126
289
Asphaltum, 246
Astley, John, and Schomberg
House, 108, 149
Atholl, Duke of, 147
— Duchess of, 146
Augusta, Princess, 326 ; see also
Portraits
Bach, John Christian, 98, 114, 117,
119, 120, 388
Bailey, ^^'illiam, 279
Baldrey, Andrew, 19
— Joshua Kirby, 20
Baltinglass, Lord ; see Aldborough
Bampfylde, C. W., 358
Barry, James, R.A., 113, 216, 269
Bartolozzi, Francesco, R.A., 207,
309
Basset, Sir Francis, 241, 354
Bate, Rev. Henry (Sir Henry
Bate Dudley), the champion of
Gainsborough, 127; a founder
of the Morning Post, his man-
ner and appearance, 128 ; in-
fluence on newspapers, 129 ;
the affray at Vauxhall, 131 ;
399
400
THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
nicknamed " The Fighting
Parson," 132 ; advertising the
Morning Post, the Piccadilly
procession, 133 ; founds the
Morning Herald, 135 ; im-
prisoned for libel on the Duke
of Richmond, 136; engages
Mrs. Siddons for Garrick, 137 ;
adopts the name of Dudley, 1 38 ;
receives a baronetcy, 139;
assists to quell riots at Ely, 1 39 ;
dies at Cheltenham, 139 ; Gains-
borough's portrait of him at the
Academy of 1780, 168 ; attacked
by the London C our ant for sup-
porting Gainsborough, 1 74 ;
and by the World, 2.2,7 '> his
country house at Bradwell, 288;
" the most distinguished culti-
vator in Essex," 288 ; buys
Gainsborough's pictures, 342 ;
mentioned, 4, 5, 7, y6, 98, 113,
117, 127-140, 310, 361
Bate, Mrs. Henry (Lady Bate-
Dudley), 130, 139; see also
Portraits
Bath, 28-105 ; suicide at, 104 ;
accident at the New Assembly
Rooms, 79, 80 ; Bath Chronicle,
32, 35, 43, 79, 90, 91 ; Gains-
borough's houses at, 31—36 ;
Circus, The, 31—36, 48—50 ;
Bath Journal, ^t,, 43, 90 ;
Historic Houses in Bath, 31,
34; New Bath Guide, 58, 90;
Portraiture at, 390-392
Bayham, Lord, 340
Bearing, Mr., 382, 383
Beattie, James, 49, 177
Beaumont, Sir George, 303 ; buys
pictures at Gainsborough's sale,
324
Bedford, Duke of, 23, 34, 49 ;
Gainsborough's letter to, 60 ;
see also Portraits
Beechey, Sir William, R.A., no,
343
Bell, Mr. R., 134
Belvoir, 332
Bentinck, Lord Charles, 156
Berghem, Nicholas, 300
Bernard, John, Retrospection of
the Stage, 128
Betew, Mr. Panton, 27
Beverley, Earl of, 273
Bicknell Collection, the, 396
Bigg, W. R., R.A., 293
Birch, Thomas, Lives of Illustrious
Persons in Great Britain, 6, 352
Bird, Mrs. (Elizabeth Gainsbor-
ough), 4
Birmingham Corporation Art Gal-
lery, 159
Bone, Henry, R.A., 207
Books, Gainsborough's collection
of, 352
Booth, Mr. W. H., 14
Boothby, Mr., 199
Bourgeois, Sir Francis, R.A.
letter on Gainsborough, 89 ;
276, 277
Bowood, 272
Bowyer, Robert, takes Gains-
borough's house in Pall Mall,
342
Boydell, Alderman, founds the
Shakespeare Gallery, 269 ; buys
the Wood Scene, Village of Cor-
nard, 297 ; 300, 333
Bradshaw, Mrs., 93
Bradwell, Essex, 288—290, 393
Briggs, H., 245, 246, 293, 353
British Artists, Society of, 283
British Institution, 242, 249, 264,
274. 300. 301. 362, 373
British Museum, 56, 66 ; letter
by Gainsborough at, 358
Britton, John, 105
Broad wood, Messrs., & Co., sell
harpsichord to Gainsborough,
107. 364
Brook Green, Hammersmith, 352
Broom, Rev. Mr., 25
Brown, Dr., 210, 393, 394
— Mr. Frank, 395
Bryan, Michael, 348
Buccleuch, Duchess of, 290
Buckingham, Marquis of, 231 ; see
also Portraits
— House, 165, 177, 213, 250,
296, 330
Burke, Edmund, 117, 304, 309
Burnet, John, 376
Burney, Dr., 64, 192
— Fanny (Madame D'Arblay),
17. 57. 160, 163, 192, 201, 304
Burr, James, 9
— Margaret, see Gainsborough,
Mrs.
— Mary, 9
Burrell, Sir Peter (Lord Gwydyr),
buys The Market Cart, 273 ;
sits to Gainsborough, 274 ;
buys Gainsborough's Murillo,
328 ; mentioned, 193, 304, 323,
332, 354, 355
Burroughs, the Rev. Humphry,
4
INDEX
401
Burton, John, copyist of Gains-
borough, 316
— Lady, 128, 168, 290
Bute, Earl of, 72, 279
Buttall, Jonathan, attends Gains-
borough's funeral, 309 ; owner
of The Blue Boy, 372 ; sale of his
pictures by Gainsborough and
others, 377 ; property at Ips-
%vich, T,j& ; death of, 378 ; see
also Portraits
Calonne, M. de, 186, 187
Cambridge, Duke of, 97, 164, 177
Campbell, Thomas, 136
Campbell's Vitnwiiis, 352
Carhni, Agostino, R.A., 217
CarUsle, Earl of, 116
— Countess of, 348
Carnarvon, Earl of, 292
Carysfort, Lord, 1 32
Cathcart, Lord, 146 ; see also
Portraits
Chalmers, George, 393
Chamberlain, Mr. A. B., Thomas
Gainsborough, 5
Chambers, Sir William, R.A.,
Gainsborough's letter to, 204 ;
architect of Somerset House
— his design criticised, 221 ;
supports Gainsborough in the
quarrel of 1784, 224; one of
Gainsborough's pall-bearers,
309 ; Treatise on Civil Architec-
ture, 352
Champione, travelling dealer in
works of art, 91
Charlotte, Queen, 17, 115, 320.
326, 327, 344 ; see also Portraits
Charlton, Dr., of Bath, Thicknesse
on, 46 ; attends Margaret Gains-
borough, 79 ; his pictures by
Gainsborough, 81, 82 ; see also
Portraits
Chatham, Earl of (William Pitt
the elder), his house in The
Circus, 34, 49 ; his commissions
to Bath artists, 36
Chatsworth, 42, 152
Chawner, T., his plan of Schom-
berg House, 1 1 1
Child, Mrs., 324
Cholmondeley, Lord, 155
Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich, 8,
13. 24
Christie, James, advertisements
in Bath papers, 92 ; Gains-
borough at his sale-rooms in
Pall Mall, 112; robbed by
highwaymen, 117; sells the
pictures at Schomberg House,
341 ; sells Gainsborough's un-
finished portraits and pictures,
346 ; and his prints, books, and
lay figures, 351, 352; see also
Portraits
Christie, Manson & Woods, Messrs,,
97, 199, 202, 259, 273, 301, 314,
343. 394, 395
Cipriani, Giovanni, R.A., decor-
ates Bach's concert-room, 114,
115, 221, 295
Claude, opinions of Reynolds and
Gainsborough on his land-
scapes, 57, 276 ; engravings of
his pictures in Gainsborough's
collection, 351
Cleveland, Duke of, 40
Clive, Lord, 82
Clutterbuck, James, 55 ; Gains-
borough gives him a copy of
Garrick's portrait, 82
Cobbold, Mr. FeUx, 13
Coke, Thomas William, of Nor-
folk (Lord Leicester) commis-
sions Gainsborough to paint a
portrait of the Prince of Wales,
235 ; his daughters Ann and
Jane said to be pupils of Gains-
borough, 268 ; sf? a/so Portraits
Collins, Samuel, introduces William
Jackson to Gainsborough, 56 ;
see also Portraits
— WilHam, R.A., owns Gains-
borough's painting-table, and a
doll dressed by him, 231, 351
Colman, George, 52
Colour, criticisms of Gainsborough,
87, 143 ; his advice to Garrick
and to Bourgeois, 88, 89
Colourmen, artists', of the eight-
eenth century, 92, 93, 248, 249,
254
Constable, John, R.A., i ; his
letter to J. T. Smith on Gains-
borough in Suffolk, 26 ; his
uncle owns Gainsborough's Wood
Scene, Village of Cornard, 301
Copies, by Gainsborough, of Hud-
son, 124-5 '' °f Velasquez, 249,
322 ; of Rubens, 282 ; of Van-
dyke, 249, 322 ; copies of Gains-
borough's landscapes, 316
Copley, John Singleton, R.A.,
portrait ol Major Montgomery
and Fuseli's Satan, 169 ; 215 ; a
witness in the Desenfans-Van-
dergucht trial, 280
2 C
402
THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
Comard, Great, 301
Cosmetic Artists, Society of, 89
Cosmetics, abuse of, in Gains-
borough's time, 89, 90
Costume, importance of, in por-
traiture, 73-76, 391
Cosway, Richard, R.A., 108, 113 ;
at the Desenfans-Vandergucht
trial, 279
— Maria, 151
Cotes, Mr., 309
Cotterell, Mr. T. Sturge, 34
Cotton, William, Sir Joshua Rey-
nolds and his Works, 8
Courtenay, Mr., see Henderson
Coventry, Countess of, a victim to
cosmetics, 89
Coj'te, Rev. Mr., 15
— Dr., his botanical garden at
Ipswich, 16
Craighton, W., editor of the Ips-
wich Journal, shows Thicknesse
Gainsborough's effigy of " Tom
Peartree," 12 ; situation of his
garden described, 13, 16
Croker, John Wilson, 394
Crosdill, Mr., the violoncellist, his
picture of Fox Dogs, 362 ; see
also Portraits
Cumberland, Henry Frederick,
Duke of, at Sir Joshua's studio,
144; 163 ; see also Portraits
— Anne, Duchess of, a trouble-
some sitter to Wright of Derby,
loi ; 144 ; see also Portraits
— Richard, brings from Spain
Gainsborough's Murillo, St John
in the Wilder>2ess, 275
Cunningham, Allan, 7, 13, 14, 39,
115, 116, 152, 216, 251, 304
Curtis, Ann, lectures at Dr.
Graham's Temple of Health, 109
Cust, Mr. Lionel, his notes on
Gainsborough's Mrs. Robinson,
183 ; on the Gainsboroughs in
the Royal collections, 348
Cuyp, 300
D'Abernon of Esher, Lord, 314
Dalrymple, Grace (Mrs. Elliott,
Madame St. Alban), her Journal
of My Life during the French
Revolution, 155 ; see also Por-
traits
Dance, George, R.A., 216, 217
— Nathaniel, R.A., supports
J Gainsborough in the first quarrel
with the Academy, 95, 96 ; his
discourteous treatment of the
Society of Arts, 125; the envoy
of the Academy to Gainsborough
in 1777, 142; mentioned, 113,
115, 221, 260
Daniel, George, 66, 67
D'Arblay, Madame, see Burney,
Fanny
Dartmouth, William, Earl of, 55 ;
his letters from Gainsborough,
73-76
Dawson-Damer, Colonel, and the
Prince of Wales's landscapes,
259
Delany, Mrs., Autobiography and
Correspondence, 36
Delavoye, Colonel, Life of Lord
Lyne'doch, 147, 148
De Loutherbourg, P. J., R.A.,
143, 207, 215, 286, 288, 369, 370
Denmark, King of, picture ex-
hibition in honour of, 59
D'Eon, Madame, 302
Derrick, Samuel, Master of Cere-
monies at Bath, 44, 52, 61
Derwent Water, 394
Desenfans, Noel, sells a Murillo to
Gainsborough, 275 ; his action
at law with Vandergucht, 276-
281; offers four hundred guineas
for The Woodman, 330; on Gains-
borough and Mola, 396
Devonshire, Duke of, 41, 279
— Georgiana, Duchess of, sits
to Gainsborough at Bath, when
a child, 38 ; the supposed por-
trait of 1778, 150; Gains-
borough urged to paint her, 151;
story of his alleged failure and of
the defacement of the portrait
contradicted, 153 ; visits the
Academy e3chibition of 1783,
196 ; the " Stolen Duchess,"
199 ; Hoppner's portrait of her
by Gainsborough, 200 ; the
" kissing " incident at the
Westminster election, 221, 222 ;
sits to Sir Joshua, 223 ; Gains-
borough and Reynolds con-
trasted, 232 ; a frequent visitor
to the Gainsborough exhibition
at Schomberg House, 326 ;
promises to sit to Gainsborough
Dupont, 339
— men, superiority of, 385
Dewes, Mrs., 36
Dibdin, Charles, 63
Ditcher, Mrs., a daughter of
Samuel Richardson, 160
— Miss, 160
INDEX
403
Dixon, Mr. Samuel, Bath picture
dealer, 91
Dodd, Dr., letter from Gains-
borough to, 98 ; sentenced to
death for forgery, 98 ; the wax-
modeller's ingenious scheme to
effect his escape from Newgate,
99
— Mrs., sends Mrs. Gainsborough
a silk dress, 98
Dodsley, James, 58
Dogs, Gainsborough's, 10
Doll, dressed by Gainsborough,
231
Dorset, Duke of, his degradation of
his Order of the Garter, 1 80, 244
Downman, John, A.R.A., quarrels
with the Academy Council, 220
Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, Rodney
Stone, 241
Drapers' Hall, portrait at, 285
Drapery Painting, 71, 387
Dudley, Sir Henry Bate, see Bate.
the Rev. Henry
Dulwich Gallery, 250, 277
Duncannon, Lord, 324
Dunning, John (Lord Ashburton),
384
Dunstanville, Lord de, see Sir
Francis Basset
Duntze, Mr., 385
Dupont, Alfred, 336
— Gainsborough, highwaymen
take his watch, 119; Gains-
borough leaves him a hundred
pounds and his painting mate-
rials, 311 ; apprenticed to his
uncle, 336 ; student of the
Royal Academy, 336 ; quarrels
with Thicknesse, 337 : alleged
drunken habits, 338 ; finished
Gainsborough's portrait of Pitt,
339 ; abandons engraving, 339 ;
exhibits at the Academy, 340 ;
resemblance of his work to that
of his uncle, 340 ; unsuccessful
candidature for the A.R.A.,
342 ; commissions from the
King, 343 ; his portraits at
Trinity House, 343, 344 ; mis-
understanding with the Aca-
demy about the portrait of the
Princess of Wales, 344 ; paint-
ing the young Princesses at
Windsor, 345 ; death of, 345 ;
the sale of his property an ex-
cuse to dispose of the unfinished
portraits by Gainsborough, 346 ;
his uncle gives him The Hay-
maker and Sleeping Girl, 349 ;
a sketching tour with Gains-
borough, 355 ; his pride, 388 ;
mentioned, 71, 131, 162, 247, 309,
319, 378 ; description of his
studio, 395 ; see also Portraits
Dupont, Mary, 336
— Richard, 345
— Mrs. (Sarah Gainsborough), 4
Duponts, the London silversmiths,
5
Dupuis, Colonel, 394
— Mrs., and Gainsborough's
house at Ipswich, 23
Eagleton, Mr. J., 284
Eardley, Lord, see Gideon, Sir
Sampson
Earwig, The, 175, 177
East Anglian Daily Times, 24
Edgeworth, Maria, 38
Edwards, Edward, A.R.A., Anec-
dotes of Painters, 7, 280, 372, 375
— Gerard Noel, see Noel
Eidophusikon, The, 369
Elizabeth, Princess, 326 ; see also
Portraits
ElUs, Mr. Wynn, 199
Erskine, Mr., 393
European Magazine, The, its obitu-
ary of Gainsborough, 308, 309,
310 ; note on the origin of The
Blue Boy, 374
Exhibition, The, A Candid Re-
view of (1780), 167
— (1784), verses on, 224
The Exhibition at Spring
Gardens, 46
Exton Park, Oakham, 273 ; Gains-
borough's Woodman burnt at,
331
Falconer, Dr. Thomas, 32
— Dr. Wilbraham, and Gains-
borough's house at Bath, 32
Farington, Joseph, R.A., 280
Fashion in dress, see Costume
Ferguson, Mr., " Limner in China
ink," 16
Field, George, Chromatography,
246
Fielding, Sir John, 118
Fischer, John Christian, 86 ;
secret correspondence with
jSIary Gainsborough, 122 ;
their marriage, 162 ; appointed
i oboe-player in the Queen's
band, 163; the victim of a royal
I practical joke, 164 ; sudden
404
THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
death of, 165 ; on Mrs. Gains-
borough, ^12 ; see also Portraits
Fischer, Mrs. (Mary Gainsborough),
122, 123 ; marriage of, 162 ;
Gainsborough's bequest and its
conditions, 311; her trust
fund, 312 ; at Brook Green and
Acton, 352 ; insanity and death,
3S3 ', see also Portraits
Fisher, Kitty, 89
Fitzherbert, Mrs., and the Prince
of Wales's landscapes, 259
Fitzpatrick, Colonel, a purchaser
at Gainsborough's sale, 324
Flanders, Gainsborough's travels
in, 281, 282
Flaxman, Mr., carver and gilder,
284
Flitch of Bacon, The, 130
Flond, Miss, of Bath, 385
Folkestone, Lord, 105, 124 ; see a/50
Portraits
Fonnereau, Mr., early patron of
Gainsborough, 8, 9
Foote, Samuel, 67
Forgeries of Gainsborough's work,
316, 333
Forster, John, divides a Gains-
borough portrait with Macready,
27
Fox, Charles James, and " Per-
dita " Robinson, 182 ; connec-
tion of his election at West-
minster with Gainsborough's
quarrel with the Academy,
219-222 ; 223, 225
France, Louis XVI, King of, 272 ;
portrait of Lord Lansdowne for,
272
Francis, Sir Philip, 12
Fraser, Mr. Alexander, 10
French Ambassador, the, 328
French Gallery, Pall Mall, 274
Frost, George, of Ipswich, owns
Gainsborough's The Mall, St.
James's Park, 26, 349, 394, 395
Fulcher, George Williams, Life of
Gainsborough mentioned, 4, 14,
21, 22, 44, 45, 67, 69, 82, 104,
116, 167, 168, 171, 211, 231,
247, 264, 265, 273, 341, 349,
371
Fuseli, Henry, R.A., 70, 269 ;
Bate's article on his election to
the A.R.A., 316-318
Gainsborough, Ann, 3, 209
— Elizabeth, 2
— Emily, 2, 3
Gainsborough, Humphry, the Rev.,
4, 104, 120, 121
— John, father of the painter,
2 ; postmaster at Sudbury, 4
— John, brother of the painter,
" scheming Jack," 4 ; poverty
of, 207 ; Thicknesse visits him,
208 ; meagre doles from his
brother, 209
— John, junior, of Sudbury, 2
— Margaret (Margaret Burr),
wife of the painter ; her rela-
tives in London and Scotland,
9 ; Angelo and Fischer on her
character, 10; supposed daugh-
ter of a Duke of Bedford,
23 ; her mysterious annuity,
42 ; Gainsborough's opinion
of her, 122 ; her savings and
the value of her estate, 312 ;
advised by Reynolds and West
after the death of her husband,
314 ; sells Gainsborough's
pictures at Schomberg House,
321, 341 ; attacked by Thick-
nesse, 337, 338 ; removes from
Schomberg House, 342 ; sells
Gainsborough's unfinished por-
traits and pictures at Christie's,
345 ; death of, 350 ; mentioned,
131. 275, 281, 315, 319, 329,
333. 335
— Margaret, elder daughter of
the painter, presents a land-
scape and a portrait of Gains-
borough to the Royal Academy,
66, 295 ; her illness at Bath,
79, 80 ; friction with her father.
122 ; gives annuity to her
cousin Ann, 209 ; appointed
joint executrix to her father, 310;
value of his bequest to her, 312 ;
inherits the family pictures,
350 ; sells Gainsborough's
books and prints, 351 ; her
acquaintance with Briggs, 353 ;
dies at Acton, 353
— Mary, mother of the painter,
4
— Mary, younger daughter of
the painter, see Fischer, Mary
— Matthias, 4
— Robert, 4
— Thomas, cousin of the painter,
charitable bequests by, 3
— Thomas, boyhood at Sud-
bury, commences the Wood
Scene, Village of Coryiard, 4 ;
early life in London, he joins
INDEX
405
the St. Martin's Lane Academy,
4—8 ; returns to Suffolk and linds
a patron in Mr. Fonnereau,
8 ; marries Margaret Burr, 9 ;
meets Philip Thicknesse, 12 ;
the" Tom Peattree " effigy, 13-
16 ; sells his furniture and pic-
tures, 22 ; his house at Ips-
wich identified and described,
23-25 ; his work at Ipswich,
26, 27 ; removes to Bath, 28 ;
theory of his previous stay in
the city examined, 28, 29 ; his
houses in Bath, 31—36 ; ex-
hibits for the first time at Spring
Gardens, and receives his first
newspaper criticism, n ; his
name first coupled with that of
Reynolds, 38 ; friendship with
Garrick, 38 ; Wiltshire the
carrier and his grey horse, 40 ;
character of, by Sir Uvedale
Price, 41 ; his banking account
with Messrs. Hoare, 42 ; death
reported in the Bath papers,
43 ; elected a Fellow of the In-
corporated Society of Artists,
44 ; takes a house in The Cir-
cus, 48 ; the quarrel with
Underwood, 51-55 ; makes the
acquaintance of William Jack-
son, 56 ; painting a picture for
Garrick, 61 ; unfair comments
by Theodore Hook on the cor-
respondence of Gainsborough,
62 ; invited by Reynolds to join
the Royal Academy, 65 ; Thick-
nesse's character sketch of
Gainsborough in 1770, 71 ; his
letters to Lord Dartmouth, 72-
75 ; his opinions on costume
in portraiture compared with
those of Reynolds, 74-76 ; his
friendship for Henderson, 84-
86 ; Gainsborough's colouring
criticised and compared with
that of Reynolds, 86-89 '. liis
surroundings at Bath, 90-93 ;
on the hanging of portraits, 95 ;
suggested cause of the first
quarrel with the Royal Aca-
demy, 95-97 ; decides to leave
Bath, 99 ; the reason for his
departure, 102 ; arrives in
London, 106 ; takes Schom-
berg House, 107 ; elected a
member of the Academy Council
and votes at many elections,! 1 3,
114 ; paints picture for Bach's
concert-room, 114; early work
in London, 115, 116; robbed
by highwaymen, 1 17-120 ;
domestic troubles, 122, 123 ;
a commission from the Society
of Arts, 125 ; reconciliation
with the Academy, 142 ; the
portrait of the Hon. Mrs.
Graham, 146 ; the Duchess of
Devonshire, 150-153; com-
pared with Reynolds, 157;
revisits Bath, 159; first at-
tempt at sea-painting, x-ji ;
position at Court established,
1 -J J ; obtains the patronage of
the Prince of Wales, 1 78 ; Rey-
nolds buys the Girl with Pigs,
1 86 ; subservient attitude to-
wards sitters, 190, 191 ; at
Windsor painting the Royal
Family, 192 ; Reynolds sits to
him, 193 ; letter to the Aca-
demy Council about the Royal
portraits, 195 ; Lady Horatia
Waldegrave's portrait in the fire-
place, 205, 206 ; visits the Lakes
wth Kilderbee, 209 ; paints The
Mall, St. James's Park, 211 ;
quarrels with the Academy
about the hanging of The Eldest
Princesses, 213-220; his first
exhibition at Schomberg House,
225-231 ; tries to adopt a
beggar child, 232 ; another
comparison with Reynolds,
2 32 ; paints Mrs. Siddons, 2 36 ;
his palette, 245 ; brushes, 247 ;
subdued light in studio, 248,
391, 392 ; copies a Velasquez,
249 ; his house at Richmond,
251, 252 ; visits Bath, 253 ;
another exhibition at Schom-
berg House, 255-258; the
Prince of Wales's landscapes,
258, 259; paints The Market
Cart, 263 ; dechnes to paint
for Boydell's Shakespeare Gal-
lery, 269, 270 ; his prices for
portraits, 275 ; buys a Murillo,
275 ; gives evidence in a trial
about a disputed Poussin, 279 ;
his travels in Flanders, 281 ;
last surviving sitter, 286 ; the
Morning Herald, "always pufted
in," 288 ; exhibits at Liver-
pool, 294 ; improved relations
with the Academy, 295 ; de-
scribes the painting of Wood
Scene, Village of Cornard, 298 ;
4o6
THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
paints for Macklin's " Poets'
Gallery," 302 ; illness, death,
and funeral, 303—310 ; terms
of his will, 310 ; last portrait
and landscape by, 314 ; draw-
ings by, 315 ; exhibition and
sale of pictures at Schomberg
House, 319 ; forgeries of his
pictures, 333 ; second sale at
Schomberg fiouse, 341 ; sale
at Christie's of unfinished por-
traits by, 345-47 ; sale of
sketches, lay figures, books,
and engravings, 350-352 ; visits
Lulworth, 355 ; his influence
on English landscape painting,
356-358 ; as a musician, 359—
364 ; adventures when intoxi-
cated, 366, 367 ; his conversa-
tional powers, 367, 368 ; meets
Dr. Johnson, 368 ; his desire
to paint Shakespearean sub-
jects, 368 ; paints by candle
light, 368, 390, 391 ; model
theatre, 370 ; his personal
appearance and manner, 371 ;
love of modelling, 371 ; on
composition in pictures, 379,
383 ; " sick of portraits," 385 ;
comparison of music and paint-
ing, 387 ; life at Bath, 390 ;
expelled from the Incorporated
Society of Artists, 397
Letters from Gainsborough,
quoted or mentioned
To a correspondent in Col-
chester, 20, 21 ; to Lord Roy-
ston, 41 ; to Samuel Kilder-
bee, 58 ; to Dodsley, 58, 59 ;
to the Duke of Bedford, 60 ; to
Garrick, 61, 63, 64, 83, 88, 94,
95 ; to Henderson, 38, 85, 86 ;
to Lord Dartmouth, 72-75 ; to
Dr Dodd, 98 ; to PhiUp Thick-
nesse, 104 ; to the Hon. Thomas
Stratford, 116, 141 ; to Mrs.
Gibbon, 121, 122, 124, 162 ; to
the Society of Arts, 125 ; to
the Royal Academy, 142, 195,
213,216; to Mrs. Ditcher, 159 ;
to Sir Joshua Reynolds, 186,
307 ; to F. j\L Newton, R.A.,
195 ; to Sir WiUiam Chambers,
R.A., 204 ; to Mrs. Dupont,
207—209 ; to J. K. Sherwin,
306 ; to Henry Bate, 282,
298 ; about his illness, 304 ;
about the engraving of his por-
trait, 305 ; to Ozias Humphry,
R.A., 316; to Lord Hard-
wicke, 358 ; to William Jack-
son, 57, 379-389 ; to WilUam
Pearce, 210, 393 ; to Joshua
Kirby, 397
Pictures by Gainsborough
mentioned
Landscapes : Landguard Fort,
26 ; a landscape with sheep,
the first admitted to a collec-
tion, 43, 358 ; The Harvest
Waggon, 40 ; Landskip and
Figures, 50 ; Romantic Land-
scape with Sheep at a Fountain,
66, 295 ; The Woodman going out
before Sunrise and A Landscape
and Cattle, 81 ; The Cottage
Door, 94, 170; Sea-pieces, 173,
176, 204; The Woodcutter's
Home, 185, 186; A Woody
Landscape with Packhorses
resting by a Cottage, 255 ; Wood
Scene, Village of Cornard, 4,
296—302 ; group of seven
small landscapes, 255, 256 ;
The Woodman (Mistley Hall),
235 ; landscapes purchased by
the Prince of Wales, 229, 258,
259, 322, 325, 332 ; Landscape
with Figures and Pigs, 262 ;
Landscape with a Cottage and
Figures, 324 ; Landscape with
Cows and Horses and Land-
scape with Sheep and Figures,
325 ; The Market Cart, 263, 270,
273-275. 323-332, 356; A
Peasant Smoking at a Cottage
Door, 323, 324. 342, 356 ;
Landscape with Buildings, 342 ;
Landscapes mentioned, 38, 56,
69- 77. 94. 143. 14s. 157. 158.
169, 170, 195, 204, 207, 293,
305, 322, 324, 325. 332, 345,
346, 35°. 358
Portraits mentioned
Abel, Karl Friedrich, 143,
145, 347, 363 ; Abingdon, Earl
of, 346, 347 ; Argyll, fourth
Duke of, 50 ; Argyll, fifth
Duke of, 1 59 ; Augusta, Prin-
cess, 197 ; Aylesford, Coun-
tess of, and child, 346, 347 ;
BaceUi, Madame, 180, 184, 185,
188, 244 ; Baillie, Family, the,
213 ; Basset, Lady, see " Dun-
stanville. Lady de " ; Bate,
INDEX
407
the Rev. Henry (Sir Henry
Bate-Dudley), 140, 168 ; Beau-
foy, Mrs., 167 ; Beaufoy, Mr.,
234 ; Bedford, Duke of, 346,
347 ; Berkeley, Captain G.,
225, 227, 257 ; Berkeley, Lady,
347 ; Bouverie, the Hon.
Edward, 105 ; Brun, Madame
le, 167 ; Buckingham, Marquis
of, 290, 306 ; Buckingham-
shire, Earl of, 213, 228, 230 ;
Buckinghamshire, Countess of,
213, 228, 230 ; Burrell, Lady
Priscilla, 1 93 ; . Burrell, Sir
Peter (Lord Gwydyr), 274 ;
Buttall, Jonathan (The Blue
Boy), 70, 372-378 ; Camden,
Lord, 185, 187, 266 ; Camp-
bell, Lord Frederick, 257 ;
Cathcart, Lord, 228, 231 ;
Champain, Marquis, 346 ;
Charlton, Dr., 45, i2 ; Char-
lotte, Queen, 173, 174, 176,
177 ; Chesterfield, PhiUp Stan-
hope, Earl of, 156; Chester-
field, Countess of, 157; Christie,
James, 112, 156; Clarges,
Lady, 347; Clive, Lady, 271,
346, 347 ; Coke, Thomas
William (Earl of Leicester),
267 ; Collins, Samuel, 56 ;
Conway, General, 167 ; Corn-
wall, Sir Wolfran, 2^7, 257 ;
Comwalhs, Marquis, 194, 195 ;
Coyte, Mr. George, 167 ; Crofts,
Mrs., 228 ; Crosdill, Mr., 167 ;
Cumberland, Duke of, 143, 210,
227, 346, 348 ; Cumberland,
Duchess of, 143, 159, 210, 227,
346, 348 ; Cumberland, Duke
and Duchess of, and Lady Eliza-
beth Luttrell, 322, 327 ; Dal-
rymple, Grace (Mrs. ElHott,
Madame St. Alban), 154, 155,
156,185,188,243,244; Darn-
ley, Lord, 238, 239 ; Dart-
mouth, Countess of, 55, 73-7S.
190; De Loutherbourg, P. J.,
157; Devonshire, Duchess of
\see Spencer, Georgiana), 150-
153. 195. 196-200; Ditcher,
Mr. Philip, 159; Dixon, Mrs.,
228; Dodd, Dr., 98; Dorset,
Duke of, 1 80 ; Douglas, Lord
and Lady, 73 ; Douglas, Mrs.,
228, 231 ; Dudley, Sir Henry
Bate, see Bate, Rev. Henry ;
Dudley, Lady Bate, 290 ;
Dunstanville, Lady de, 265 ;
Dupont, Gainsborough, 314 ;
Eardley, Lady, and her daughter,
70 ; Eardley, Lady, and child,
346 ; Ehzabeth, Princess, 197 ;
Elliott, Mrs., see Dalrymple,
Grace ; Ellis, Mrs. Welbore
(Lady Mendip), 294 ; Essex,
Earl of, see Maiden, Lord ;
Fagniani, Maria (" Mie Mie "),
116; Fane, Mrs., 185, 257;
Fischer, John Christian, 167 ;
Fisher, Mrs., 228 ; Folkestone,
Lord, 124-126, 290 ; Ford,
Miss, see Thicknesse, Mrs. P. ;
Franco, Mrs., 266 ; Gage,
Lord, 143 ; Gainsborough, Mrs.,
10 ; Gainsborough, Margaret
and Mary, 27 ; Gainsborough,
Thomas, 268, 295, 310 ; Gar-
rick, David, 44, 67-70, 82, 83,
94; George the Third, 115,
116, 173, 176, 177, 196, 197,
213 ; Gloucester, Duke of , 116,
346, 347 ; Gloucester, Duchess
of (Countess W'aldegrave), 96,
97,116,159,346,347; Gossett,
Isaac, 167 ; Gould, Sir Charles,
195, 198 ; Graham, the Hon.
Mrs. Thomas, 146-149 ; Graves,
Admiral, Lord, 244, 257;
Grosvenor, Lady, 50 ; Gwydyr,
Lady, see Burrell, Lady Pris-
cilla ; Gwydyr, Lord, see Bur-
rell, Sir Peter ; HaUet, Mr. and
Mrs. [The Morning Walk), 258 ;
Hamilton, Lord Archibald, 266,
267 ; Hamilton, Lord Alex-
ander, 266, 267 ; Hanham,
Lady, 346 ; Harbord, Sir Har-
bord (Lord Suffield), 195, 203 ;
Harrington, Lord, 228, 257 ;
Haywood, Clara, 154 ; Hender-
son, John, 86, 142, 167 ; Hervey,
Captain (Lord Bristol), 59 ;
Hibbert, Mrs., 266 ; Hinges-
ton Family, 27 ; Honywood,
General, 44 ; Hood, Lord, 213,
225, 228, 244: Hopetoun,
Lady, 271 ; Howard, Mr., 228,
303 ; Howard, Mrs., 346, 347 ;
Hurd, Bishop, 173, 174, 177;
Ibbetson, Mrs., 347 ; Impey,
Lady, 259; Ipswich Musical
Club, Portrait Group of mem-
bers, 22 ; Jersey, Earl of, 346,
347 ; Kirby, Joshua, 43 ;
Knapp, Jerome, 283-285 ;
Langston, Mr., 290 ; Lansdowne,
Marquis of (Lord Shelbume),
4o8
THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
271, 272 ; Leicester, Earl of,
see Coke, Thomas William ;
Ligonier, Lord, 77 ; Ligonier,
Lady, 77 ; Linley, Thomas,
junior, 383 ; Linley, Ehza,
see Sheridan, Mrs. ; Littleton,
Lady, 347 ; Loundes, Mr., 228 ;
Lucy, Mr., 36 ; Luttrell, Lady
Elizabeth, 327 ; Maiden, Lord
(Earl of Essex), 243 ; Mans-
field, Louisa, Countess of, see
Stormont, Lady ; Marsham
Family, the, 286 ; Ma>Tiard,
Lady, 347 ; MedHcott, Mr., 38 ;
Mendip, Lady, see ElUs, Wel-
bore ; Merlin, Mr., 185, 191,
192 ; Methuen, Mrs., 347 ;
Methuen, Mr., 228 ; Minet, Mr.,
157; Minet, Mrs., 157; Moly-
neux, Lady, 66 ; Montagu,
Duke of, 62, 290 ; Montagu,
Duchess of, 62 ; Moysey, Abel,
80 ; Moysey Family, the,
79 ; Mulgrave, Lord, 244, 253 ;
Needham, Captain, 59; Nicholls,
Master (TA^Pj«A; Boy), 185, 191,
192 ; Norfolk, Duke of (Earl of
Surrey), 227, 231, 259, 265, 303 ;
Northumberland, Duke of, 195,
244 ; Nugent, Colonel, 44 ;
Nugent, Mr., 37 ; Nuthall, Mr.,
77 ; Orpin, Edward, 40 ; Os-
wald, Mrs., 346 ; Paul, Sir
Onesiphorus, 43 ; Paul, Lady,
43 ; Peer, a (purple-faced) and
Peeress, 87 ; Perrj-n, Baron,
159; Petre, Lady, 302, 303;
Pitt, George, 66 ; Pitt, WiUiam,
271, 290 ; Powis, Lord, 347 ;
Poyntz, William, 37, 38 ; Prin-
cesses, the Eldest, 115, 197,
212, 213, 215, 216, 224, 226,
230, 258, 261, 266, 316, 349;
Pujet, Mrs., 294 ; Quin, James,
38-40, 347, 348, 391 ; Radnor,
Earl of, 105 ; Ramus, The
Sisters (?), 159; Ray, Martha,
195 ; Rawdon, Lord, see Hast-
ings, Marquis of ; Robinson,
Mrs. (Perdita), 178, 180-184;
Rodney, Lord, 211, 213, 227,
231, 234, 257, 266 ; Royal
Family, the (group of fifteen
portraits), 192, 195, 196, 197,
258 ; Royal, the Princess, 197,
213 ; Rutland, Mary Isabella,
Duchess of, 193 ; St. Alban,
Madame, see Dalrymple, Grace ;
St. Leger, Colonel John, 179,
185, 188, 189, 190; Sandwich,
Lord, 194, 195, 203, 306 ;
Savoi, Signer, 347 ; Schomberg,
Dr., 81 ; Sheridan, Mrs. (Ehza
Linley), 195, 198, 200, 202, 238,
239, 257, 260, 265, 383; Sheffield,
Lady, 238, 257 ; Shelbmrne,
Lord, see Lansdowne, Marquis
of; Siddons, Mrs., 69, 76, 211,
234, 236, 239, 257 ; Skirmer,
Baron, 250, 257 ; Sloper
Family, the, 290 ; Smith, Mr.
John, 285 ; Sparrowe, John,
1 1 ; Spencer, Georgiana (Duch-
ess of Devonshire), 38 ; S-t— d,
Mrs., 91 ; Stevens, the Rev.
WiUiam, 167 ; Stopford, Lord,
228, 347 ; Stormont, Lady, 193 ;
Sufheld, Lord, see Harbord, Sir
Harbord ; Surrey, Earl of, see
Norfolk, Duke of ; Sussex,
Lady, and child, 77 ; Sykes,
Sir Francis, 283 ; Tarleton,
Colonel, 179, 184, 185, 190, 191 ;
Thicknesse, Mrs. PhiUp (iliss
Ford), 36, 99, 103 ; Tomkin-
son Boys, the, 213 ; Vane, Mrs.
228 ; Vernon, Admiral, 12, 27 ;
Vernon, Mr., 50 ; Villi ers. Lord,
28 ; Wade, Captain, 77, 78 ;
Wade, Mr., of Brighton, 346 ;
Waldegrave, Countess, see
Gloucester, Duchess of ; Wal-
degrave, Lady Horatia, 97, 19S,
205, 207, 295 ; Wales, Prince of,
17S, 179, 185, 188, 189, 190, 197,
211, 225, 232,235,253,256,282 ;
Warren Dr., 228 ; Watson, Mrs.,
257; Whichcote, Sir Christopher,
347 ; WilUam Henry, Prince
(William theFourth), 1 77; WiUes,
Mr. Justice, 266 ; Winchelsea,
" Old," 43 ; Wise, Mr., 36 ;
Wise, Mrs., 157; Wycombe,
Lord, 273
Miscellaneous Works and
Drawings
Assumption of the Virgin,
348 ; Beggar Boys, 238, 322,
326 ; Beggars, The, 228, 294 ;
Blue Boy, The, see Portraits,
" Buttall, Jonathan " ; Boy with
a Cat, The, 293, 322, 324, 329 ;
Boy at Cottage Fire and Girl
eating Milk, 322, 324, 329; Cart
Horse, The Old, 350 ; Comic
Dancing, 363 ; Comic Muse, A,
114; Cottage Children with the
INDEX
409
Ass, 250, 251, 265, 273, 332 ;
Cottage Children, see Wood
Gatherers, The ; Cottage Girl,
The, 1 79 ; Cottage Girl with Dog
and Pitcher, 234, 241, 242, 243,
250, 266, 292 ; Diana and
ActcBon, 348 ; Fisher Boy, The,
332 ; Fox Dogs, 362 ; Fox
Hunt, A, 328 ; Girls with a
Donkey, see Cottage Children
with the Ass; Girl ivith Milk,
263, 264, 294 ; Girl Gathering
Mushrooms, 348 ; Girl with Pigs,
185, 186, 187, 193, 242, 261,
277 ; Girl going to the Well, see
Cottage Girl with Dog and Pitcher;
Haymaker and Sleeping Girl,
The, 349 ; Housemaid, The,
348 ; Jack Hill in his Cottage,
293 ; Lavinia, 264, 302 ; Mall,
St. James's Park, The, 26, 211,
226, 229, 250, 322, 329, 342,
348, 349. 394. 395 : proposed
companion picture to, 250 ;
Mushroom Gatherer, The, see
Girl Gathering Mushrooms ;
Musidora Bathing her Feet, 109,
348 ; Nymph at the Bath, A,
see Musidora; Park, The, see
Mall, The ; Peasant Girl with
Sticks, The, 179; Representa-
tion of St. James's Park with
drest Figures, see Mall, The ;
Rural Lovers, The, 27; Rustic
Amusement, see Cottage Chil-
dren with the A ss ; Shepherd, A ,
173, 174, 177. ^79. 238, 241,
326 ; Two Shepherd Boys with
Fighting Dogs, 195, 204, 262 ;
Tom Pcartree, 8, 12-16 ; View
in St. James's Park, A, 348
(see Mall, The) ; Woodman, The,
235. 285, 296, 322, 323, 329,
331. 332. 371 ; Wood Gatherers,
The, 242, 291, 292, 294 ; Young
Hobbinol and Gandareita, 302
Drawings
A Book of Drawings (1770),
69 ; at National Gallery, 299 ;
forgeries of. 31 5. 3^6; Gains-
borough's gifts of, 320, 388 ; in
coloured chalks, 320, 327 ; sketch
books, 351
Gainsborough, Henry Noel, Earl
of, buys The Woodman, 323,
330, 331 ; 354
Gandon, James, 18
Gardiner, ^Mrs. (Susannah Gains-
borough), 4
Gardner, Daniel, 221
Garrick, David, Gainsborough on,
38, 86 ; letters by, 38, 136, 137 ;
Stratford, portrait of, 67—69 ;
correspondence with, 61—64, 83,
88, 94; death of, 157; men-
tioned, 18, 41, 52, 81, 112, 128,
129, 132, 189, 368 ; see also Por-
traits
— Mrs., 82, 83, 94, 95
Gautier, Theophile, on The Morn-
ing Walk, 258
Gazetteer, The, 143, 167, 205, 299
General Advertiser, The, 146, 240
General Evening Post, The, 155,
156, 310
General Magazine, The, 313, 340
Gentleman's Magazine, The, 69, 93,
104, 308, 393, 395
George the Third, King, 211, 252,
296, 323, 343, 344 ; see also
Portraits
George the Fourth, 393
Giardini, Felice de, buys harp-
sichord for Gainsborough at
Broadwood's, 107 ; mentioned,
17, 55, 64, 86, 235, 359-361. 384
Gibbon, Mrs. (Mary Gains-
borough), 4, II, 120, 121, 162,
208, 338
Gibbs, James, Architecture, 352
Gideon, Sir Sampson (Lord Eard-
ley) and the Prince of Wales, 70
Gloucester, Duchess of, 327 ; see
also Portraits
Gossett, Isaac, wax-modeller, 168,
309 ; see also Portraits
— Rev. Isaac, 167
Gower, Mr. F. C., of Ipswich, 24
— Lord, 325
— Lord Ronald, 170, 230, 325
Grafton, Duke of, 60
— Galleries, London, 179, 249
Graham, Dr., 108
— Mr. John Murray, 147
— Mr. Robert, of Redgorton,
149
— Thomas (Lord Lynedoch),
147-149
— the Hon. Mrs. Thomas, 231,
348 ; see also Portraits
Grantham, Lord, 249
Gravelot, Hubert, 5
Graves, Mr. Algemo'n, 45, 146, 157
— The Rev. Richard, hues
addressed to Gainsborough at
Bath, 47
410
THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
Gray, Thomas, 170, 210, 393
Green, Thomas, of Ipswich, 22, 23,
394
Greenwich Hospital, 194
Greenwood, John, artist and
auctioneer, 297, 334, 346
Grenville, Mr., 271, 340
Grignion, Charles, 6
Grosvenor, Earl, 94, 373
— GaUery, 67, 133, 157, 265,
293. 370, 393
— Lady, 144; see also Portraits
— Sir Richard, 144
Guildhall, exhibition at, 185
Gwydyr, Lord, see Burrell, Sir
Peter
Haberdashers' Company, the,
283, 284
Haddy, Mr., 60
Halswelle, wreck of the, 253
Hamilton, Colonel James, 320 ;
Gainsborough gives him The
Boy at the Stile, 365
— Duke of, 266, 273
— Lady, 108, 109
— Sir William, 139
— William, R.A., 269, 318
Hampstead, 251
Handbook for Young Painters, The,
242, 2,77
Handel, George Frederick, 64, 282
Hanover Square, 363, 383
Harcourt, Lord, 28
Harcourt Papers, The, 29
Hardinge, Mr. George, buys pic-
tures at Gainsborough's sale, 324
Hardwicke, Earl of, 41, 42, 358,
359
Harley, Alderman, 266
Harris, Thomas, collection of
theatrical portraits, 343, 395
Harris Letters, The, 114
Hartley, Mrs., 132
Harwich, the salt water baths at,
21
Hastings, M'arren, trial of, 303,
304 ; Dupont's portrait of, 395
Hayley, WilUam, lines on Gains-
borough, 263
Hayman, Francis, R.A., 6, 7, i7S
Hazlitt, William, 242 ; Conversa-
tions of James Northcote, 251,
27s ; 292
Heberden, Dr., 304
Henderson, John, 38, 84-86 ; see
also Portraits
Herkomer, Sir Hubert von, R.A.,
344
H ertf ord , third Marquis of , 1 1 6 , 1 8 3
Highwaymen, rob Gainsborough
and his nephew, 1 1 7-1 1 9 ;
attack Thomas Graham, 147
Hill, Jack, model of Gains-
borough's, 292, 293
— Mr., restores pictures at
Exton Park, 331
Historical Manuscripts Commis-
sion, 72, 107
Hoare, Messrs. Charles, & Co.,
bankers, 42
— Henry, " Banker at Temple
Bar," 41 ; buys landscape from
Gainsborough, 43, 358
— Lady, buys picture at Gains-
borough's sale, 294, 324
— Prince, sculptor, 36
— Prince, 357, 358
— Sir Richard Colt, 358
— WiUiam, R.A., 36, 107
Hobbema, 300
Hodges, WiUiam, R.A., 280
Hogarth, WilUam, his connection
with Joshua Kirby, 18 ; 54, 189
Holdernesse, Lord, sells Schom-
berg House, 108
Holkham, Gainsborough at, 268,
283
Holl, Frank, R.A., 344
Holman, the actor, 396
Hone, Nathaniel, R.A., 113
Hook, Theodore, unfair criticisms
of Gainsborough's letters, 62, 63
Hoppner, John, R.A., his portrait
of the Duchess of Devonshire by
Gainsborough, 200 ; art critic
to the Morning Post, 223 ; buys
Gainsborough's lute, 352 ; men-
tioned, 73, 99, 232, 233, 336,
343. 357
Hotham, Baron, 118
Houbraken, 6
Howe, Lord, 343, 344
Huddart, Captain, F.R.S., 343
Hudson, Thomas, jealousy of
Gainsborough, 38, 39 ; 124, 125,
333
Humphrey Clinker, 48, 85
Humphry, Ozias, R.A., 46, 56,
316; his notes on Gainsborough
at Bath, 390—392
Hunt, Mr. John, Town Clerk of
Westminster, 107
Hunter, John, surgeon, 304, 309
Huntingdon, Mr. H. E., collection
of pictures in America, 302
Hutchins, Boulton, & Philips,
Messrs., 183
INDEX
411
Indigo, 246, 383, 386
Ipswich, Christchurch Mansion, 8,
13, 24 ; eighteenth century, 1 1 ;
the Ipswich Journal, 12, 13, 16,
21, 22, 25 ; the Musical Club at,
22 ; Gainsborough's house at,
21—25 ; Pennington's plan of,
23 ; Shire Hall, the, 22
Ireland, John, 86, 142
Ironmongers' Hall, Lord Hood's
portrait at, 225
ItalianLandscape, Gainsborough's
sketches of, 351
Italy, not visited by Gainsborough,
351. 396
Jackman, Isaac, Editor of the
Morning Post, 136
Jackson, John, R.A., 27, 371
— Stephen, of the Ipswich
Journal, 13
— Thomas, 57
— Wilham, of Exeter, his con-
cert at Bath, 55 ; introduced
to Gainsborough, 56 ; portraits
of, 56 ; on Gainsborough as a
musician, 57, 359-364 ; Gains-
borough's letters on his behalf
to the Duke of Bedford, 60 ;
Gainsborough's letters to him,
57, 379—389; on The Blue Boy,
372 ; mentioned, 50, 59, 104, 123,
200, 201, 231, 246, 282, 306, 315,
331, 359
Jameson, Anna, on the Mrs.
Siddons, 237 ; 376
Jaye, musical instrument maker,
385
Jersey, William, Earl of, 29
Johnson, Dr. Samuel, 37, 72, 128,
176, 195, 220; his acquaint-
ance with Gainsborough, 368
Jones, William, fruit-painter, of
Bath, 92
Kauffman, AngeUca, R.A., 207
Keate, Mr., 95
Keenan, J., portrait of Jackson of
Exeter, 56
Kemble, Fanny, on the Mrs.
Siddons, 236
Kew, Gainsborough buried at,
309; his grave, 313; church
registers stolen, 353
Kew Green, 210, 251
Kilderbee, Samuel, of Ipswich, 23 ;
Gainsborough's letters to, 58,
124 ; visits the Lakes with
Gainsborough, 210, 325, 393 ;
at Gainsborough's death -bed,
306 ; acts as " overseer " of his
will, 310 ; sale of his pictures,
349. 394. 395
Kilderbee, S. H., 395
Kirby, Joshua, his high character,
1 7 ; Hogarth encourages him to
paint, 18 ; leaves Ipswich, 19 ;
the King and his book on per-
spective, 37 ; his landscape
said to have been painted by
the King, 51 ; elected Presi-
dent of the Incorporated Society
of Artists, 65 ; the first to call
the King's attention to Gains-
borough, 115 ; mentioned, 113,
24s. 309. 352, 397 '. 5f« «'^o
Portraits
— William, pupil of Gains-
borough, 19
— William, M.A., 18
Kneller, Sir Godfrey, 2 1
Knight, Mr., buys landscapes at
Gainsborough's sale, 324
Knoedler & Co., Messrs., 177
Knole, 180, 200
Lade, Sir John and Lady, 241
Lakes, the, 209, 210, 287, 325, 393
Landscape painting, influence of
Gainsborough on, 356, 357
Landscapes, see Gainsborough,
Thomas.
Landseer, Sir Edwin, R.A., 230
Lane, Mrs. Sophia, on Gains-
borough's boyhood, 5 ; men-
tioned, 304, 314, 335, 351, 353
— Edward WiUiam, 5
— Richard James, A.R. A., 5, 351
— the ]\Iisses, gift of pictures to
the National Gallery, 350
Lawrence, Sir Thomas, "P.R.A.,
236 ; on The Blue Boy, m
Lay figures, sale of Gains-
borough's, 351
Le Brun, Madame Vigee, 280
Leggatt Brothers, Messrs., 13
Leicester, Sir John ; see Tabley,
Lord de
Leighton, Lord, 394
Leslie, Charles Robert, R.A., 128,
186, 242, 351, 371, Z77
— G. D., R.A., 120, 351
Library of the Fine Arts, The, 1 12
Liesching, Mr. H. S., of Trinity
House, 344
Linley, EUza (Mrs. R. B. Sheri-
dan), see also Portraits
— Family, the, 55, 390
412
THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
Linley, Thomas, 129, 200, 309, 390
— Thomas, junior, 200, 383, 390
Liverpool, Gainsborough exhibits
at, 294
London Chronicle, 51, 146
London Courant, 169, 174, 175,
188
Lowe, Mauritius, and The Earwig,
176
Lucas, Lord, 249
Luck, Mr., 393
Lulworth Castle, Gainsborough
visits, 355
Lynedoch, Lord, sec Graham,
Thomas.
Lysons, Daniel, Environs of Lon-
don, 251
Lyttleton, Lord, 133
" M.^L," 189 ; anecdote of Gains-
borough and Abel, 366
Macklin, Thomas, 264 ; gives
commissions to Gainsborough,
293 ; his " Poets' Gallery," 302
Macready, \V. C, divides a Gains-
borough portrait with John
Forster, 27
Mair, Major, sells the Mrs. Sid-
dons to the National Gallery, 236
Malton, T., 352
Marlborough, Duchess of, and
Gainsborough's drawings, 320
Marlow, William, 221
Mason, the Rev. Wilham, 176
Melbourne, Lord, 108
Mendoza, D., 365
Merhn, Joseph, 192 ; see also Por-
traits
Meyer, Jeremiah, R.A., 113, 260,
309
Michael Angelo, Gainsborough's
supposed pictures by, 321
Michel, the engraver, 287
Middlesex Journal, 87
Middleton, \V., artists' colourman,
249
— Park, 29
Miller, Mr., 254
Mitchell, Mr. Henry, 353
Modelling, 8, 371
Mola, P. F., Gainsborough's ad-
miration for, 396
Mond, Dr. Ludwig, and Gains-
borough's Murillo, 328
— Mrs. Ludwig, 328
Monthly Ledger, The, 394
Monthly Magazine, The, 370
Monthly Mirror, The, 360, 366
More, Hannah, 180, 182
^lorgan, John Pierpont, 200
Morland, George, 56 ; supposed
collaboration with Gains-
borough, 140
Morning Chronicle, The, 6, 7, 8, 15,
116, 143, 146, 154, 156, 170, 196,
247, 260, 292, 308
Morning Herald, The, founded by
Henry Bate, 135 ; the success-
ful rival of the Morning Post,
1 36 ; attacked for its support
of Gainsborough, 174, 286—288 ;
mentioned, iii, 128, 129, 131,
133, 134, 138, 140, 151, 153, 158.
164, 172, 173, 190, 192, 201, 205,
211, 213, 223-226, 234, 239, 243,
245, 248, 261, 269, 274, 275, 290,
293.299. 315. 316, 320, 323, 326,
328, 333. 336, 338, 341, 362
Morning Post, The, foundation of,
128 ; the Drury Lane adver-
tisements, 129; quarrels
among the proprietors and
foundation of the New Morn-
ing Post, 1 34 ; libel on the
Duke of Richmond, 135 ; the
editor fined and imprisoned
for libeUing the editor of the
Morning Herald, 1 36 ; severity
of its earlier art criticisms and
successful protest by artists,
138; first review of Gains-
borough's pictures, 144 ; amus-
ing error in criticism of Gains-
borough, 203 ; engages John
Hoppner and other artists as
critics, 223; mentioned, 131—
136, 145, 146, 157, 158, 168, 169,
172, 183, 198,215,217,232,239,
260, 308, 315, 333, 357
Morning Post, The New, 133—135
Morris, WiUiam, 2
Morrison, Richard, sells the Wood
Scene, Village of Cornard, 297
Moser, Mary, R.A., 70, 373
Moysey, Dr., of Bath, 42, 79, 80,
388
— Abel, 80
Mulgrave, Lord, 320 ; see also Por-
traits
Murillo, Gainsborough buys his
St. John, 275, 321, 328
Music and Gainsborough, 359-366,
390
National Gallery, The, 27, 40,
106, 109, 132, 140, 168, 213, 234,
236, 257, 274, 292, 294, 296, 299,
301, 323, 328, 348, 350
INDEX
413
National Loan Exhibition, The
Cottage Girl, 179
— Portrait Gallery, Admiral Ver-
non, 27; Charles, Marquess Corn-
wallis, 194
Neeld, Sir Audley, 394
Newcastle, Henry, Duke of, buys
the Two Beggar Boys, 326
Newman, Mr., artists' colourman,
248
Newton, F. M., R.A., 195, 216, 217
Noel, Gerard Noel, Mr., his pic-
tures burnt at Exton Park, 331
Nollekens, Joseph, R.A., 50, 364
Norman, Barak, 385
North, Lord, 74, 117
Northcote, James, R.A., 114, 193,
2i7, 250, 254, 269, 371
Northumberland, Duke of, 273 ;
see also Portraits
Notes and Queries, 364
O'Keefe, John, 395
Opera House, the, Gainsborough's
painted figures at, 363
Opie, John, R.A., 56, 254
Orleans, Duke of, proposed por-
trait of by Gainsborough, 253,
262
Orlebar, Eliza, visits Gams-
borough's studio at Bath, 107
Ossory, Lady, Walpole's letter to,
133
Otway, Thomas, 146
Painting-table, Gainsborough's,
231
Palliser, Admiral, Sir Hugh, trial
of, 158, 194
Palmer, John, of Bath, letter to
Ganick about Gainsborough , 79,
379, 380, 382, 386, 387, 388
— John, junior, 339, 340
Paper, drawing, 58, 388
Parke, W. T., Musical Memoirs by,
123, 130, 164, 187, 364
Pasquin, Anthony (JohnWilhams),
7, 89. 247, 248
Passavant. M., Tour of a German
Artist in England, 376
Peach, R. E. M., 31, 32, 34, 35
Pearce, William, 210, 251, 392-
394
" Peartree, Tom," 8, 12-16, 24,
152 ,, J
Penmanship, Gainsborough s ad-
miration for, 371
Peters, Matthew William, R.A.,
46, 216, 217
Peterborough, Hinchliffe, Dr.,
Bishop of, 278
PhiUips, Sir George, anecdote of
The Girl with Milk, 264
Piccadilly, the Morning Post pro-
cession in, 133
Picture-dealers and Wood Scene,
Village ofCornard, 299; French,
280; near Hanover Square, 383
Pierce, Captain, of the Halswelle,
254
Pindar, Peter, on Gainsborough's
portraits of the Royal Family,
197
Pine, Robert Edge, 189
— Simon, 54
Piozzi, Mrs., Letters and Literary
Remains, 271
Pitt, William, the elder ; see Chat-
ham, Earl of
— William, painted by Gains-
borough, 271, 290; another
portrait finished by Dupont,
338 ; sits to Dupont for por-
trait. 339 ; 340, 343, 344. 395
Porchester, Lord, buys The Wood
Gatherers, 291 ; 292, 294
Portfolio, The, 10
Portland, Duke of, 1 56
Portraits, Gainsborough on the
hanging of, 95
Portraiture, Gainsborough's meth-
ods in, 391, 392 ; importance of
costume in, 73-76, 391
Potter, Paul, 300
Poussin, Nicolas, 276-281
Powell, Mr. J. Rubens, 393
Poynter, Sir Edward, P.R.A., 24
Prestel, Mary C, 299
Pretender, The Young, 2
Price, Sir Uvedale, character of
Gainsborough, 41
Prince Regent, the, 139
Princess Royal, the, 326, 327 ; see
also Portraits
Prints, sale of Gainsborough's
collection, 351
Pritchard, Mrs.. 62,
Public Advertiser, The, new de-
parture in journalism, 44 ; men-
tioned, 68, 96, 143, 171. 172,
180, 188, 198, 239, 240, 260
Pyne, W. H., 2, 6
Quarterly Review, The, Hoppner's
article in, 233
Queensberry, Duke of, y^
Quick, John, 395
Quin, James, 38-42
414
THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
Radnor, William, Earl of, 105,
124, 125 ; see also Portraits
— Helen Matilda, Countess of,
105
Raeburn, Sir Henry, R.A., 249
Ramsay, Allan, 72, 231, 344
Ranelagh, 117
Raphoe, ISishop of, 294
Rasse, Elizabeth, 22, 25
— Thomas, 25
Redgrave, Richard, R.A., 193
Reeves & Son, Messrs., 254
Refreshments, bill for, in 1752, 3
Repository of Arts, The, 356
Reynolds, Sir Joshua, P.R.A., on
Gainsborough as a self-taught
artist, 7, 8 ; early connection
of his name with that of Gains-
borough, 38, 46 ; opinion of
Claude, 57 ; invites Gains-
borough to join the Royal Aca-
demy, 65 ; on costume in por-
traiture, 76 ; Gainsborough's
rivalry with, 143, 157, 174, 184,
202 ; buys the Girl with Pigs ;
his letter of compliments to
Gainsborough, 1 86 ; sits to
Gainsborough, 193 ; his work
criticised as Gainsborough's,
204 ; the Prince of Wales soli-
cits his vote for Fox, 219, 220 ;
a comparison wi th Gainsborough ,
232, 233 ; on Gainsborough as
a copyist, 249 ; visits Gains-
borough on his deathbed, 306-7;
assists Mrs. Gainsborough with
his advice, 314 ; reproved by
Richard Wilson, 370 ; the
alleged origin of The Blue Boy,
37S~377 '> expelled from the
Incorporated Society of Artists,
397 ; mentioned, 37. 45, 70,
73> 80, 95—97, loi, 102, 106,
115, 124, 132, 142, 144, 158, 166,
180, 183, 206, 214-216, 223, 224,
235—237, 240-245, 251, 261, 262,
269,272—280. 301, 304, 316-318,
344. 346, 351
Richards, John Inigo, R.A., 217
Richmond, 250, 251
Richmond, Duke of, 135, 136
— George, R.A., 314
— SirW. B., R.A., 314
Riddell, Buchanan-, Lady, Gains-
borough's last surviving sitter,
286
Rigby, Richard, of Mistley, 235
Rimbault, E. P., 364
— Stephen Francis, 364
Robins, Mr., a Bath landscape
painter, 91
Robinson, Mr., auctioneer, 140
Robinson, Mrs. (Perdita), 243 ; see
also Portraits
Rogers, Samuel, 264, 265
Rolliad, TAc, 237
Romney, Charles, Earl of, 286
— George, 180, 181, 193, 221,
239, 240, 260, 269, 270, 286,
361
Rosebery, Earl of, 329
Rothschild, Mr. Alfred de, 234
— Miss Alice de, 238, 267
— Baron, Ferdinand de, 159, 231
— Lord, 201, 202, 286
Rousseau, J. J., 192
Rowlandson, Thomas, 117
Royal Marriage Bill, the, 97
Royston, Lord, 41, 42
Russell, Jesse Watts, 300, 301
— John, R.A., 295
Rutland, Duke of, 185
— Charles, Duke of, 186, 332
Ruysdael, 300
5/. James's Chronicle, The, earliest
newspaper criticism of Gains-
borough, 2)7 > mentioned, 54,
66, 104, 153, 158, 191, 196, 198,
217, 218, 220, 224, 366
Salting, George, 394
Sandby, Paul, R.A., 221, 309, 358,
359
— William, History of the Royal
Academy of Arts, 332
Schomberg, Dukes of, 81, 108
— House, Pall Mall, taken by
Gainsborough, 107 ; history of,
108-112, 149, 150; first ex-
hibition at, "A View of Mr.
Gainsborough's Gallery," 226 ;
sales of Gainsborough's pictures
at, 319, 341
— Dr. Ralph, 52, 79 ; see also
Portraits
Scotland, National Gallery of, 146,
149
Scots Magazine, The, 147
Scott, John, artists' colourman, of
the Strand, 248
— Mr., portrait painter, and
Mrs. Siddons's nose, 370
— Sir Walter, 108
Seguier, F. P., Dictionary of
Painters, 335
— William, 273
Selwyn, George, 116
Seymour, Georgiana, 155
INDEX
415
Seymour, INIr. Hugh F., 207
Shakespeare, WiUiam, portrait of,
61 ; statue of, 66
— Festival, the, at Stratford-
on-Avon, 61, 66—69
— Gallery, the (Boydell's), 269,
270, 293
Shee, Sir Martin Archer, P.R.A.,
217
Shelbume, Lord, Gainsborough
visits, 384 ; see also Portraits
Shelley, Frances, Lady, Diary of,
155
Shenstone, WilUam, The School-
mistress, 157
Sheridan, Anne, 160
— Mrs.R.B. (Eliza Linley),busts
of, 371 ; 390 ; see also Portraits
— Richard Brinsley, 129, 160,
303, 304. 309. 320, 322, 349, 368
— Thomas, 98, 99
Sherwin, J. K., 126, 306
Shield, William, 130
Shockerwick, Bath, 40
Shum, F., F.S.A., 31, 32, 35
Siddons, Mrs. Sarah, engaged by
Garrick through Henry Bate,
136, 137 ; sits to Gainsborough,
236; mentioned, 76, 128, 223,
370 ; see also Portraits
Simpson, the oboe-player, 163
Sketchbooks, Gainsborough's, sale
of. 351
Skirrow, Mr., buys The Mall, St.
James's Park, 349
Smirke, Robert. R.A., 269
Smith, J. T., 26, 27, 50, 109, 247,
278, 330, 364, 371, 373. 376
Smollett, Tobias, Humphry Clin-
ker, 48
Somerset House, the Royal Aca-
demy removes to, 161, 166 ;
construction criticised, 221
Somerset House Gazette, The, 217
Somerville, William, 302
Sophia, Princess, 327
Sotheby, Wilkinson «& Hodge,
Messrs., 183
Soward, Mr. A. \V., C.B.. 312
Spanish Ambassador, the, 249
Spence, the Rev. Joseph, Poly-
metis, 352
Spencer, Countess, 199
Earl, 199
Spender, Dr., of Bath, 31, 35
Spring Gardens, exhibition at,
see Artists, The Incorporated
Society of.
Squire, Mr. William Barclay, 105
Stephens, F. G., 69, 133, 134,
392
Sterne, Laurence, 280, 366
Stourhead, 43, 358
Stow, Mrs., 343
Stowe, 290
Stratford, The Hon. Thomas, 116,
141
Stratford-on-Avon, 44, 61, 66-69
Straub, Professor, 57
Strutt, Mr., 22
Stuart, Gilbert, 221, 266, 270
Stubbs, George, A.R.A., Anatomy
of the Horse, 352
Sudbury, 1-5, 207-209, 297-300,
371
Suffolk Fund, 2
Sutherland, Duke of, 325
Tabley, Lord de (Sir John Lei-
cester), 329
Talmage, Mr. John F., 178
Tarleton, Colonel, 181-183 ; see
also Portraits
Taylor, Brook, Perspective made
Easy, 18
— John, painter, 6, 7, 373
— John, amateur artist, of
Bath, 85
— John, journalist, on Henry
Bate, 129
Thicknesse, George, 12
— Philip, meets Gainsborough
at Ipswich, 12 ; his story of
the origin of " Tom Peartree,"
1 5 ; with Gainsborough at
Bath, 31 ; his character of
Gainsborough in 1770, 71, 72 ;
his quarrel with the artist, 99-
loi ; financial difficulties, sells
house at Bath and goes abroad ,
102, 103 ; his story of the
Duchess of Devonshire's por-
trait, 153 ; his connection and
quarrel with Gainsborough
Dupont, and his charge against
Gainsborough, 12,7, 338 ; "a
pest to society," zz'i '. Bate
ridicules his anecdotes of Gains-
borough, 153, 361, 362 ; men-
tioned, 7, 8, 10, II, 18, 30, 36,
45,46, 50,-103, 104, 107, 115, 123,
190, 207, 208, 217,225, 247, 310,
33&-338, 361, 371^ ^
Thomson, James, The Seasons, 302
Thombury, Walter, 245
Tickell, Richard, 368
Titian, 277 ; The Blue Boy painted
in emulation of, 374
4i6
THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
Tollemache, Mr., patron of Gains-
borough, 262, 354
Tooke, John Home, 99
Town and Country Magazine, The,
29
Townshend, Charles, 12
Tremlett, Mr., 383
Tresham, Henry, R.A., 113
Trimmer, Mr., 309
— Mrs. Sarah, 1 7
— the Rev. H. S., 245, 246
Trinity House, portraits at, 343,
344
Trusler, the Rev. Dr., 117, 134
Tunney, the Rev. J. R., 23, 24
Turner, J. M. W., R.A., 176, 245,
249
Tyr\vhitt,Mr. ,buys Gainsborough's
last landscape, 314
Udney, Mr., 279
Underwood, Thomas, 51—55, 69,
102
Universal Magazine, The, verses
on Bradwell, 289
Universal Museum, The, 51
Upper Ossory, Earl of, 187, 277,
280
Vandergucht, Benjamin, lawsuit
with Desenfans, 276-280
Vandevelde, WilUam, 252, 351
Vandyke, Sir Anthony, 62, 235,
249, 265, 266, 267, 306, 321, 322,
344. 351, 2,72
Varnish, and Lord Shelburne,
272 ; Gainsborough's " exqui-
site transparent," 331
Vauxhall, the affray at, 131
Velasquez, Gainsborough copies
The Conspirators, 2^g; 250, 321
Victoria, Queen, 230
Victoria and Albert Museum, 27
Vitruvius, see Campbell.
Waagen, Dr., 376
Waddesdon Manor, fire at, 159
Walcot, Bath, 34
— Dr., 362
Waldegrave, Countess, 96 ; see also
Portraits
Wales, The Prince of, his intrigue
with Perdita Robinson, 180;
owner of her full-length por-
trait by Gainsborough, 183 ;
stratagem to secure Sir Joshua's
vote for Fox, 219—221, 230, 258,
304, 394 ; see also Portraits and
Landscapes
Wales, The Princess of, Dupont's
portrait of, 344
Wallace Collection, the, 183
Walpole, Horace, criticisms of
Gainsborough's pictures, 38, 150,
170, 176, 197, 199; on Gains-
borough's first quarrel with the
Academy, 95—97 ; examination
of his statement concerning a
portrait of the Duchess of
Devonshire at the Exhibition
of 1778, 150-152 ; his Anec-
dotes of Painting in England
in Gainsborough's library, 352 ;
mentioned, 21, 117, 168, 180,
230, 243, 271
Walton, Henry, pupil of Zoflani,
280
Ward, Edward Matthew, R.A.,
repairs Gainsborough's grave-
stone, 313
Wardle, Mr. F. D., Town Clerk of
Bath, 34
War Office, the, at Schomberg
House, 110
Watkins, Dr. John, Life of Queen
Charlotte, 115
Watteau, 211, 226
Watts, G. F., R.A., 344
— Mr. David Pike, uncle of
John Constable, R.A., owns
Gainsborough's Wood Scene,
Village of Cornard, 30 1
Webb, Daniel, 36
Weld, Mr., of Lulworth, 355
Wertheimer, Mr. Charles, 202
West, Benjamin, P.R.A., 113. 114,
215, 241, 265, 269, 277, 278, 280,
281, 309, 314
Westall, Richard, R.A., 269
V/estminster, the connection of
Gainsborough and Reynolds
with the Parliamentary elec-
ton of 1784, 219-221, 224, 225
— Hall, the trial of Warren
Hastings in, 303, 304
Westminster Magazine, The, 87
Westmoreland, Lady, 36
Whitefoord, Caleb, buys three
Gainsborough's for thirteen
shillings, 347
Whitehall Evening Post, The, 214
Whitehall Evening Review, The,
281
Whitehead, William, 28
Wigstead, Mr., 315
Wilkie, Sir David, R.A., 347
William the Fourth (Prince Wil-
liam Henry), 177, 327
INDEX
417
Williams, Gilly, 43
— John, see Pasquin, Anthony.
Willoughby de Eresby, Baroness
(Lady Priscilla Burrell), 273
Wilson, Benjamin, his picture at
Stratford-on-Avon, 66-69 ; bill
for frame of Garrick's por-
trait, 67
— Richard, R.A., 68, 248, 370
Wiltshire, John, his story of
Gainsborough's grey horse,
40
— Walter, of Bath, 39 ; his
pictures by Gainsborough, 40
Windham, William, 8, 9
Windsor, 192, 230, 250, 328, 343,
348
Wolfe, Mr. T. Birch, 140, 299
Wood, Tohn, architect at Bath,
48!
Wood, Robert, Rutns of Baalbec,
352
World, The, on Gainsborough and
Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery,
269, 270 ; attack on Bate and
Gainsborough, 286-288 ; elegy
on Gainsborough, 313
Wright, Joseph, A.R.A., of Derby,
settles in Bath after Gains-
borough's departure, loi, 102 ;
210, 221, 239, 240, 260, 269, 397
— Mrs. Phoebe, wax-modeller,
99
Wynants, Jan, 300
Yeo, Richard, R.A., 246
York, Frederick, Duke of , 1 97, 2 3 1 ,
290, 291, 322
Young, Arthur, 288
— John, engraver, his story of
The Blue Boy, 275- 37^
ZoFFANi, John, R.A., 45, 177, 254,
280, 344
Printed by Ballantyne, Hanson &» Co.
Edinburgh iSf London
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