# Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Gainsborough, Thomas

1904 Errata appended.
​GAINSBOROUGH, THOMAS (1727–1788), painter, was born in 1727 at Sudbury, Suffolk, in a picturesque old house which had once been the Black Horse Inn. The day of his birth is unknown, but he was baptised at the independent meeting-house, 14 May 1727. His father, John Gainsborough, was a dissenter, engaged in the wool manufactures of the town. He is said to have been a fine man, careful of his personal appearance, an adroit fencer, kind to his spinners and also to his debtors, of good reputation, but not rigid in the matter of smuggling, enterprising and active in business, 'travelling' in France and Holland, and the introducer into Sudbury of the shroud trade from Coventry. Mrs. John Gainsborough, whose maiden name was Burroughs, was the sister of the Rev. Humphrey Burroughs, curate of the church of St. Gregory, and master of the grammar school at Sudbury. They had nine children (five sons and four daughters), of whom Thomas was the youngest. The daughters were all married: Mary to a dissenting minister of Bath, named Gibbon; Susannah to Mr. Gardiner of the same city; Sarah married Mr. Dupont, and Elizabeth Mr. Bird, both of Sudbury. The sons' names were John, Humphry, Mathias, and Robert. Mathias died of an accident in his youth, and of Robert little is known, but both John and Humphry were remarkable for their mechanical ingenuity. John was well known in Sudbury as 'Scheming Jack.' He made a ​pair of copper wings and essayed in vain to fly, and among his other inventions were ‘a cradle which rocked itself, a cuckoo which would sing all the year round, and a wheel that turned in a still bucket of water.’ He also painted, and was about to sail to the East Indies to prove an invention for the discovery of longitude, when he died in London. The second brother, Humphry, was a dissenting minister at Henley-on-Thames, who declined to take orders though offered preferment in the church of England. His leisure hours were given to mechanics, and his experiments upon the steam engine are said to have been far in advance of his time. According to Fulcher his friends declared that Watt owed to him the plan of condensing the steam in a separate vessel. He invented a fireproof box, the utility of which was proved by a fire in a friend's house, and for a tide-mill of his invention he obtained a premium of 50l. from the Society for the Encouragement of Arts. A curious sundial of his contrivance is in the British Museum.
Thomas alone, of all the sons, cost his parents little. He supported himself after he was eighteen. From the first his bent towards art was decided. An intense love of nature and a facility for taking likenesses seem to have been born in him. His only known encouragement from without came from his mother, who was ‘a woman of well-cultured mind, and, amongst other accomplishments, excelled in flower-painting.’ He was sent to his uncle's grammar school, but spent all his holidays in sketching rambles. He told Thicknesse that ‘there was not a picturesque clump of trees, nor even a single tree of any beauty, no, nor hedgerow, stem or post,’ in or around his native town, which was not from his earliest years treasured in his memory. On one occasion he successfully forged his father's handwriting to a strip of paper bearing the words ‘Give Tom a holiday.’ When the fraud was discovered his father promptly prophesied that ‘Tom will one day be hanged,’ and, on seeing how the boy had employed the stolen time, declared that ‘Tom will be a genius.’ The lad one morning sketched the face of a man peeping over the fence of his father's (or a friend's) orchard. The man took to his heels when Gainsborough interrupted his assault upon a pear tree, but the sketch already taken was sufficient to identify the thief. From this sketch he afterwards painted a picture which was exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1885. It is on a board cut to the outline of the head, and when he went to Ipswich he set it up on the garden palings, to the deception of many, including Philip Thicknesse, who took it for a real man, and was so pleased that he called on the artist.
‘At ten years old,’ says Allan Cunningham, ‘Gainsborough had made some progress in sketching, and at twelve was a confirmed painter,’ and in his fifteenth year he was sent to London to the care of a silversmith ‘of some taste,’ to whom, according to a writer in the ‘Gentleman's Magazine,’ he always acknowledged great obligations. For some time he studied under Gravelot, the French engraver, at his house in James Street, Covent Garden, where he met Charles Grignon, who assisted him in his first attempts at etching. Here he acquired the skill which enabled him to etch the few plates (about eighteen) and the three aquatints which are mentioned in Bryan's ‘Dictionary’ (Graves). Fifteen of the etchings were published after his death by Boydell. He was employed by Gravelot in designing ornamental borders for Houbraken's portraits, and also by Alderman Boydell, but after entering the St. Martin's Lane Academy he left Gravelot's studio for that of Frank Hayman [q. v.] After three years under Hayman he hired rooms in Hatton Garden, where he painted landscapes for dealers at low prices, and portraits for three to five guineas. He also practised modelling of animals. After a year thus spent without very satisfactory results he returned to Sudbury in 1745.
He now continued his study of landscape and fell in love with Miss Margaret Burr, a beautiful girl with an annuity of 200l. a year, whom he soon married, being at that time nineteen years old, and one year older than his bride. According to the earlier biographers of the artist much mystery surrounded this young lady and the source of her annuity. It was said that she was the daughter of an exiled prince, or of the Duke of Bedford, and that the pair met accidentally ‘in one of Gainsborough's pictorial excursions,’ but even according to Fulcher her brother was a commercial traveller in the employ of Gainsborough's father, and her father, it is now asserted, was a partner in the business.
The newly married couple, after a brief residence in Friar Street, Sudbury, hired a small house in Brook Street, Ipswich, at a yearly rent of 6l. Here the artist made the acquaintance of Joshua Kirby [q. v.], who became his warm friend, and placed his son William with him when he went to London. He also appears to have had another pupil here, where he remained till 1760, gradually improving in skill and position. It was in 1754 that he met Philip Thicknesse, his earliest biographer, then lieutenant-governor ​of Landguard Fort, who describes his portraits at this time as ‘truly drawn, perfectly like, but stiffly painted, and worse coloured.’ Among his sitters was Admiral Vernon. For Thicknesse he painted a view of Landguard Fort with the royal yachts passing the garrison under the salute of guns, which was engraved by Major. To this Ipswich period belong his more carefully drawn and detailed landscapes in the Dutch manner, like the wood scene, with a view of the village of Cornard in Suffolk (No. 925 in the National Gallery), and known as ‘Gainsborough's Forest,’ under which name a print of it was published by the Boydells in 1790. Among his friends and patrons at Ipswich were Mr. Kilderbee, Mr. Edgar, a lawyer of Colchester, and the Rev. James Hingeston, vicar of Raydon, Suffolk (portraits of members of the Edgar and Hingeston families and other works of Gainsborough belonging to the Edgar family were exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in the winters of 1885 and 1888). Mr. Hingeston's son, in a letter quoted by Fulcher, gives a very pleasant picture of Gainsborough in these days. Gainsborough, he says, was generally beloved for his affability; received with honour by the country gentlemen, and winning the grateful recollections of the peasantry. The panels of several of the rooms in Hingeston's house were ‘adorned with the productions of his genius. In one is a picture of Gainsborough's two daughters, when young; they are engaged in chasing a butterfly.’ Music at this time, as afterwards, was the principal amusement of his leisure hours. Thicknesse lent him a violin, on which he soon learnt to play better than the lender; and he belonged to a musical club at Ipswich, and painted a picture of the members.
At the suggestion of Thicknesse, who passed his winters at Bath, Gainsborough removed to that city in 1760. Much to the alarm of his wife he took lodgings in the newly built Circus, at the rent of 50l. a year. But sitters flocked to him at once, and the portrait of Thicknesse, which was to have been painted as a kind of decoy-duck, was put aside and never finished. He soon raised his price for a head from five to eight guineas, and ultimately fixed it at forty guineas for a half, and a hundred for a whole length. The Society of Artists, founded in 1759, held their first exhibition in London in the following year, and he contributed to its exhibitions from 1761 to 1768, sending eighteen works in all. This society was incorporated by royal charter in 1765, and Gainsborough's name appears on the roll of members in 1766. In 1768 he was elected one of the original members of the Royal Academy, and contributed to its exhibitions from 1769 to 1772, when, in consequence of some misunderstanding with Sir Joshua Reynolds, he withdrew his contributions for four years, by the end of which time he was settled in London. After this quarrel, as after that of 1783, he sent a picture or so to the Free Society. During this period (1769–72) he exhibited several landscapes, large and small, with and without figures, but then, as afterwards, the majority of his contributions were portraits. As Gainsborough never signed and seldom dated his works, and as in the catalogues the landscapes are without titles and the portraits unnamed, except in the case of persons of importance, it is difficult to identify most of the pictures as exhibited in any particular year, but the following portraits are duly named: 1761, Mr. Nugent, afterwards Lord Clare; 1762, Mr. Poyntz; 1763, Quin the actor and Mr. Medlicott; 1765, General Honywood (on horseback) and Colonel Nugent; 1766, Garrick (for the corporation of Stratford-on-Avon, said by Mrs. Garrick to be the best portrait ever taken of ‘her Davy’); 1767, Lady Grosvenor, John, duke of Argyll, and Mr. Vernon, son of Lord Vernon; 1768, Captain Needham and Captain Augustus Hervey (afterwards Earl of Bristol); 1769, Isabella, lady Molyneux, and George Pitt (eldest son of the first Lord Rivers); 1770, Garrick; 1774, Lady Sussex, Lord and Lady Ligonier (2), Mr. Nuthall and Captain Wade. All of these were whole lengths, except the Garrick of 1766, which was three-quarters. One at least of the unnamed portraits added greatly to his reputation. Writing to Fuseli at Rome, Mary Moser [q. v.] observes: ‘I suppose there has been a million of letters sent to Italy with an account of our exhibition, so it will be only telling you what you know already to say that Gainsborough is beyond himself in a portrait of a gentleman in a Vandyke habit.’ One of the pictures of this year is described in the catalogue as ‘Portrait of a Young Gentleman,’ and it has been suggested that the picture referred to by Miss Moser was none other than the famous ‘Blue Boy.’ Some of the pictures of the Bath period are identified by their having been in the possession of Mr. Wiltshire, the public carrier of Bath, who ‘loved Gainsborough and admired his works,’ and could not be persuaded to accept payment for taking his pictures to London. To him the artist, with his accustomed generosity, gave some of his finest pictures, including portraits of Quin and Foote the actors, Orpin, the parish clerk of Bradford-on-Avon (now in the National Gallery), and some ​landscapes, of which one, called by Fulcher ‘The Return from Harvest,’ but engraved by Finden as ‘The Hay Cart,’ contains portraits of Gainsborough's two daughters. It was sold in 1867 for 3,147l. 10s., and was exhibited by Lord Tweedmouth at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1885 under the title of ‘The Harvest Waggon.’ Besides those already named, Gainsborough painted while at Bath portraits of Lord Kilmorey, Mr. Moysey (there is a sketch of it in the National Gallery), Dr. Charlton, Mr. Thicknesse, the first Lord Camden, Cramer, the metallurgist, Richardson, the novelist, Sterne, Chatterton, and John Henderson, the actor. Of the last he became the firm friend and patron, and some lively letters which he wrote to him have been preserved, in which he praises Garrick as ‘the greatest creature living in every respect,’ and adds, ‘he is worth studying in every action. … Look upon him, Henderson, with your imitative eyes, for when he drops you'll have nothing but poor old Nature's book to look in. You'll be left to grope about alone, scratching your pate in the dark, or by a farthing candle. Now is your time, my lively fellow. And do you hear, don't eat so devilishly. You'll get too fat when you rest from playing, or get a sudden jog by illness to bring you down again.’ This is a fair sample of the style of Gainsborough's correspondence, spirited, careless, sometimes too free in expression, but always fresh and often witty. To his strong taste for music he added a passion for fine musical instruments, and William Jackson [q. v.] of Exeter, the composer, gives a humorous account in his ‘Four Ages’ of the manner in which Gainsborough acquired in rapid succession Giardini's violin, Abel's viol-di-gamba, Fischer's hautboy, the harp of a harper, and the theorbo of a German professor. Without accepting Jackson's theory that Gainsborough thought he could acquire the art of the musician by purchasing his instrument, we may well believe him when he says that ‘though possessed of ear, taste, and genius, he never had application enough to learn his notes,’ and that ‘there were times when music seemed to be Gainsborough's employment and painting his diversion.’ Both had something to do with his flight to London in the summer of 1774, the immediate cause being a quarrel with Thicknesse about that eccentric gentleman's unfinished portrait and his wife's viol-di-gamba.
On his return to London Gainsborough took up his residence in the west part of Schomberg House, Pall Mall (this part is still standing), for which he paid 300l. a year to John Astley the painter [q. v.], who occupied the remainder. A few months after his arrival the king summoned him to the palace, and after this the full tide of prosperity flowed till his death. In 1777 he began again to exhibit at the Royal Academy, sending a large landscape and six portraits, among which were those of the Duke and Duchess of Cumberland, Lord Gage, and Abel. The large landscape was declared by Horace Walpole, in his notes on this year's catalogue, to be ‘in the style of Rubens, and by far the finest landscape ever painted in England, and equal to the great masters.’ Among the ten works he exhibited in 1778 were a portrait of Christie the auctioneer (a present from the artist) and the Duchess of Devonshire. He is said to have been dissatisfied with this portrait of the lovely duchess, and would not send it to Chatsworth. ‘Her Grace is too hard for me,’ he averred, and drew his pencil across the mouth. He exhibited another picture of the duchess in 1783, and a picture in the Wynn Ellis collection named ‘The Duchess of Devonshire’ was sold in 1876, and was bought by Messrs. Agnew for 10,605l., a price higher than any before given for a picture at Christie's [see Cavendish, Elizabeth]. A few days afterwards it was stolen, and was has not been recovered since. Early in 1779 (says Fulcher) Gainsborough probably painted that full-length portrait of the son of Mr. Buttall, which is usually known as ‘The Blue Boy,’ and this portrait is said to have been painted to refute the opinion of Sir Joshua Reynolds in his eighth discourse ‘that the masses of light in a picture should be always of a warm, mellow colour,’ and the cold colours ‘used only to support and set off these warm colours.’ This discourse was delivered in December 1778, so that the picture of 1770 before referred to, if it really were a ‘Blue Boy,’ could not have been affected by it. Gainsborough probably painted more than one ‘Blue Boy,’ and there are many copies, but the picture belonging to the Duke of Westminster is the most famous of those to which the name has been given. There is no doubt that it is authentic and a masterpiece, and the questions as to when it was painted, whom it represents, whether it was meant to refute Sir Joshua's dictum, and whether it does refute it, or only evades it, cannot be discussed here. (The notes by Mr. F. G. Stephens to the Grosvenor Gallery Winter Catalogue of 1885 contain information and references which will be useful to any one who wished to study these problems.)
At the exhibition of 1779 were portraits of the Duchesses of Gloucester and Cumberland, the Duke of Argyll, and Judge Perryn. ​At that of 1780 (the first exhibition at Somerset House), among his sixteen contributions were six landscapes, and portraits of General Conway (governor of Jersey), Madame le Brun, the vocalist, Henderson, and Mr. Bate, afterwards Sir Bate Dudley, and others. The last is now in the National Gallery. In the exhibition of 1781 were portraits of the king and queen and Bishop Hurd, together with ‘A Shepherd’ and ‘three landscapes,’ which included two described by Walpole as ‘pieces of land and sea so natural that one steps back for fear of being splashed.’ The most celebrated works of 1782 were the portraits of the Prince of Wales and the dissipated Colonel St. Leger, which were painted to be exchanged as tokens of friendship between the prince and the colonel. The former is now in the possession of the St. Leger family, the latter at Hampton Court. This was also the year of the ‘Girl with Pigs,’ which was purchased by Sir Joshua Reynolds. In 1783 Gainsborough sent no less than twenty-six pictures to the Academy, fifteen of which were heads only, portraits of the royal family, a complete set with the exception of Prince Frederick. The other portraits were the Duchess of Devonshire, the Duke of Northumberland, Lord Cornwallis, and Lord Sandwich (for Greenwich Hospital), Sir Harbord Harbord, M.P., afterwards Lord Suffield (for St. Andrew's Hall, Norwich), Sir Charles Gould, Mrs. Sheridan, and Mr. Ramus. A landscape, a seapiece, and ‘Two Shepherd Boys with dogs fighting,’ conclude the list for 1783.
Next year, 1784, in consequence of a dispute about the hanging of a picture containing the portraits of the Princess Royal, Princess Augusta, and Princess Elizabeth, he withdrew all his pictures (eighteen) and never exhibited at the Academy again, and shortly afterwards opened an exhibition of his own works at his house in Pall Mall, which had no great success. Among the more celebrated pictures painted after this were the lovely portrait of Mrs. Siddons, now in the National Gallery, the ‘View in the Mall of St. James's Park,’ now belonging to Sir John Neeld, which is described by Hazlitt as ‘all in a motion and flutter like a lady's fan—Watteau is not half so airy,’ and the ‘Woodman and the Storm,’ since destroyed by fire, but well known from the engraving. Gainsborough had difficulties with the face of Mrs. Siddons, as with that of the Duchess of Devonshire. The tip of her nose baffled his draughtsmanship, and he is said to have thrown down his brush, exclaiming ‘D——the nose, there is no end to it.’ In the early part of 1787, according to Allan Cunningham, while dining with Sir George Beaumont and Sheridan, he told Sheridan that he felt he should die soon, and made him promise to come to his funeral. In February of the next year, while attending the trial of Warren Hastings, ‘he suddenly felt something inconceivably cold touch his neck,’ and on his return home his wife and niece found on his neck ‘a mark about the size of a shilling, which was harder to the touch than the surrounding skin, and which, he said, still felt cold.’ This proved to be a cancer, of which he died ‘about two o'clock in the morning of the 2nd of August 1788, in the sixty-second year of his age.’
Gainsborough's life in London seems to have differed little from his life elsewhere, except that he had more money to spend. In 1779 he writes to his sister Mrs. Gibbon that he lives at ‘a full thousand a year expense.’ He set up a coach, but only for a little while. He had lodgings at Richmond in the summer, and sometimes at Hampstead. There is a record of a short visit of his family to the Kilderbees of Ipswich in 1777, and after the close of the exhibition of 1783 he took a tour with Mr. Kilderbee to the Lake district, but as a rule he stayed in London, and was satisfied with his home circle and a few friends, among whom were Sir George Beaumont, Burke, and Sheridan. Though the favourite painter of the court, he was no courtier, and though the aristocracy and many eminent men, such as Pennant and Hurd, Blackstone and Clive, came and sat to him, he seems to have made no attempt to cultivate their society. But there is little known about his life in London, except what can be gathered from a few letters, a few anecdotes, and the names of his sitters. His home life seems to have been a happy one. Mrs. Gainsborough has been described as the kindest as well as the loveliest of wives, and he is said to have liked nothing so well of an evening as sitting by his wife making one rapid sketch after another. Though the quickness of his temper or other cause occasionally provoked a quarrel, it was of short duration. They exchanged pretty little notes of reconciliation in the names of their pet dogs, who carried them in their mouths. His two daughters were beautiful, but the marriage of Mary to Johann Christian Fischer [q. v.] the musician was not agreeable to her father, and both she and her sister Margaret were subject to mental aberration, from which Mrs. Gainsborough in her later years is said not to have been free. With his own family he seems to have been always on affectionate terms. He acted almost in loco parentis to Gainsborough Dupont [q. v.], his nephew, and made him an excellent artist. Dupont helped him with his pictures, engraved them, and finished those which he left ​uncompleted at his death. He helped his brother ‘Scheming Jack’ with many a five-pound note, only to be wasted in brass for mechanical experiments. He has left behind in a fine portrait a record of the affection which always subsisted between him and his brother Humphry. Indeed, in spite of his unevenness of temper and capriciousness, he appears to have been of so genial a disposition that he never had a downright quarrel with any of his relations or friends, if we except that with Philip Thicknesse, who quarrelled with everybody from his fellow-officers to his son.
Before he died there took place that meeting between him and his great rival Sir Joshua which is one of the most pathetic episodes in the history of art. The relations of Gainsborough and Sir Joshua, of Gainsborough and the Academy, had always been somewhat strained. Gainsborough's treatment of both was cavalier, to say the least of it, and he was unreasonable in the matter of the hanging of his pictures. He had taken his honours as an academician as a matter of course, but discharged none of the duties of his position, and never attended to his colleagues' invitations ‘whether official or convivial.’ They had, not unnaturally, resented this neglect, and once passed a resolution to scratch his name from the list of their members, which was generously rescinded, without any improvement in the behaviour of Gainsborough. Sir Joshua had called upon him, but he neglected to return his visit. Sir Joshua had sat to him at his request, but Gainsborough had neglected to finish his portrait. On the other hand Reynolds had behaved well and even handsomely towards him, had bought his ‘Girl with Pigs,’ and paid, or obtained for him from M. de Calonne, forty guineas more than he asked for it. He now declared him, at a meeting of the Artists' Club, to be ‘the first landscape-painter in Europe,’ thereby drawing upon him the famous retort of Richard Wilson, that ‘Gainsborough was in his opinion the greatest portrait-painter at this time in Europe.’ On the other hand, Gainsborough had simply ignored Sir Joshua, but a few days before his death Reynolds tells us that Gainsborough wrote to him ‘to express his acknowledgments for the good opinion I entertained of his abilities, and the manner in which (he had been informed) I had always spoke of him; and desired he might see me once more before he died.’ The impression left by the interview upon Reynolds was ‘that his regret at leaving life was principally the regret of leaving his art; and more especially as he now began, he said, to see what his deficiencies were, which he said he flattered himself in his last works were in some measure supplied.’ ‘If any little jealousies had subsisted between us,’ his old rival says, ‘they were forgotten in those moments of sincerity, and the dying painter whispered to Reynolds, “We are all going to heaven, and Vandyck is of the party.”’
According to his wishes he was buried near his friend Kirby in Kew churchyard. His pall-bearers were Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sir William Chambers, Paul Sandby, West (afterwards Sir Benjamin), Bartolozzi, and Samuel Cotes. Sheridan was there as he had promised, and his nephew, Gainsborough Dupont, was chief mourner.
In the December after Gainsborough's death Sir Joshua Reynolds delivered his fourteenth discourse to the students of the Royal Academy, which was chiefly devoted to the genius of Gainsborough. It is a noble and generous tribute to his rival's memory, and, if we make allowances for the then prevalent views, remains still the most full and weighty analysis of his work which has ever been written.
In March 1789 an exhibition of the works remaining in his possession at his death was opened at Schomberg House, which was full of those landscapes and rustic pictures which he could not sell during his life, although they (with a few notable exceptions) have fetched far higher prices than his portraits since his death. A list of these works is given by Fulcher, as well as of the large collection of Gainsborough's paintings exhibited at the British Institution in 1814. A still larger gathering was at the Grosvenor Gallery in the winter of 1885.
No artist was ever at once more new, more natural, and more English. Whether in landscape or pastoral or portrait, he drew his inspiration entirely from his subject, and tinged it with his own sentiment. Some touch of Watteau's grace may have come to him through Gravelot. He may have applied himself, as Reynolds says, to the Dutch and Flemish masters, but what he learned from Rubens and Vandyck ‘he applied,’ as Reynolds also says, ‘to the originals of nature which he saw with his own eyes; and imitated not in the manner of those masters, but in his own.’ So he became the father of modern landscape, and of modern pastoral also, breaking away from the ‘classical’ traditions of Claude on the one hand, and the affected pastorals of Boucher and his school on the other. In portraits he was scarcely less original, painting his ladies and gentlemen in a manner entirely pure and unaffected, yet with such spirit, grace, and dignity as nature had endowed them with. He chose to represent them in their most quiet and unconscious moments with the ‘mind and ​music breathing from the face.’ Principally because he painted his sitters so, he became the rival of Reynolds, weak where he was strong, and strong where he was weak, and yet often approaching him so nearly that the distance between them is scarcely measurable.
Gainsborough is well represented in the National Gallery and other public galleries in England. A list of these pictures will be found in Bryan's ‘Dictionary.’ There is also a fine collection of his drawings in the British Museum.
C. M.
Dictionary of National Biography, Errata (1904), p.131 N.B.— f.e. stands for from end and l.l. for last line
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