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What’s Gainsborough famous for?
- painting Mr and Mrs Andrews
- painting The Blue Boy
- being very musical
Thomas Gainsborough’s paintings epitomize for many the golden yesterday of English people and places. Portraits of richly-dressed aristocrats and celebrities together with beautifully-captured English landscapes form the main body of Gainsborough’s work and these images have made him one of the English best-loved artists today. NowYouKnowAbout Artists brings your children Gainsborough’s life story in DVD format as an easy introduction to great historical figures.
Thomas Gainsborough was born in 1727 in Sudbury, in Suffolk. His dad was a school teacher-cum-wool merchant and his mum was busy giving birth to several children, running the home. She also found time to develop quite a reputation for her pretty flower drawings. No wonder Thomas was good at art!
Like most of the artists featured in this entertaining and educational DVD for children, Gainsborough wasn’t very interested in schoolwork and preferred roaming freely outside with his dog and his sketchpad. Young Thomas loved the world. Landscapes were to remain his favourite painting subject his whole life long. He showed promise as an artist as early as 14 and was sent by his father to London to learn from the French painter, Hubert Gravelot. There he started to mix with some of the established stars of the art world and there’s no doubt that rubbing shoulders with the famous artists of the day helped him get on.
The idea of art galleries where people could wander around looking at pictures had not yet been established at that time and Thomas found it difficult to get his work seen. He gave one of his best early pictures, a round one called ‘The Charterhouse’ to an orphanage so that it could decorate the big, bare walls. He also decorated the smart picnic area in London’s Vauxhall Gardens and this allowed his painting to be admired by more people.
He married Margaret Burr after falling in love while painting her portrait. Like him, she was mad keen on dogs. She was the illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Beaufort and when she married Thomas, the Duke gave her a big wodge of pocket money to get her started. Nice for Thomas as he was rather poor.
However, despite the extra money, Gainsborough still wasn’t hitting the big time. Suffolk was full of country bumpkins, merchants and local landowners. Go and look at Mr and Mrs Andrews (National Gallery). They are a perfect example of the sort of portraits Gainsborough was painting at this time. He needed to move up a gear.
In 1759, Thomas moved the whole family to Bath, the celebrity-stuffed town full of rich, gorgeous people, many of whom wanted a nice portrait of themselves looking glamorous. Gainsborough knew this and carefully studied the works of Anthony van Dyck whose paintings were big favourites with this sophisticated crowd. Find a copy of ‘The Blue Boy’ and see how deliciously smart he looks.
While Gainsborough was busy painting in Bath, in London some people had finally set up the first public gallery where artists could send their best pictures and visitors could come and admire them. A short time later a second gallery appeared. This is known today as the Royal Academy on London’s Piccadilly. Thomas sent his big celebrity pictures up to London to be shown at these exhibitions but he was VERY particular about how his pictures were shown and he often argued with the gallery workers.
By this stage, Gainsborough was around 50 years old and was at the top of his game. He regularly painted the top aristocrats and smartest society people wearing gorgeous clothes in huge and sumptuous portraits. He even painted King George III and also the King’s three daughters.
As he grew older, Gainsborough spent more time on his first love, landscape painting. Many of these pictures are rather simple and ordinary scenes but they all show a great affection for and understanding of the English countryside. These, together with his many fine portraits of society’s best-known faces, give us a wonderful window into the time when he lived.
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