It locates Gainsborough in relation to Reynolds and Hogarth on the one hand, to Rubens and Van Dyck on the other. Painterly reflexes and habits of feeling are both explored in this finely illustrated volume. But Bishop Berkeley brilliantly challenged Locke's empiricism with its emphasis on the geometric. Berkeley underlines the constructive role of the intellect in our interpretation, in our 'reading' of 'the perpetual mutability and fleetingness of those immediate objects of sight'. Our authors analyse the interactions of these two epistemological points of view in Gainsborough's 'ambiguities of space', in his capacity to imply, to enact motion in his sitters.
Static poses turn wonderfully active.
A ribbon, a piece of lace can carry both light and shadow, embodying their dynamic interconnectedness. Asfour and Williamson demonstrate the contradictions between the landscape and the two figures. Hunting props contrast with the imagery of harvest. The privileges of squierarchy and ownership are subtly subverted not only by the scale of the land but by implications of seasonal, almost sacred autonomy far outweighing the boastful transience of human ownership. These seminal tensions are crystallised, as it were, in the famous off-centredness of the young couple.