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Self Portrait,
1787
Thomas Gainsborough
was an English painter who is considered one
of the great masters of portraiture and landscape.
Gainsborough was born in Sudbury, Suffolk,
on May 14, 1727. He showed artistic ability
at an early age, and when he was 15 years
old he studied drawing and etching in London
with the French engraver Hubert Gravelot.
Later he studied painting with Francis Hayman,
a painter of historical events. Through Gravelot,
who had been a pupil of the great French painter
Antoine Watteau, Gainsborough came under Watteau's
influence. Later he was also influenced by
the painters of the Dutch school and by the
Flemish painter Sir Anthony van Dyck. From
1745 to 1760 Gainsborough lived and worked
in Ipswich. From 1760 to 1774 he lived in
Bath, a fashionable health resort, where he
painted numerous portraits and landscapes.
In 1768 he was elected one of the original
members of the Royal Academy of Arts; and
in 1774 he painted, by royal invitation, portraits
of King George III and the queen consort,
Charlotte Sophia. Gainsborough settled in
London the same year. He was the favorite
painter of the British aristocracy, becoming
wealthy through commissions for portraits.
Gainsborough died in London on August 2, 1788.
Gainsborough executed more than 500 paintings,
of which more than 200 are portraits. His
portraits are characterized by the noble and
refined grace of the figures, by poetic charm,
and by cool and fresh colors, chiefly greens
and blues, thinly applied. Among his world-famous
portraits are Orpin, the Parish
Clerk (Tate Gallery, London); The Baillie
Family (1784) and Mrs. Siddons (1785),
both in the National Gallery, London; Perdita
Robinson (1781, Wallace Collection, London);
The Hon. Francis Duncombe (1777?, Frick Collection,
New York City); Mrs. Tenant (1786-1787, Metropolitan
Museum, New York City); and many in private
collections, including The Blue Boy
(1779?, Huntington Collection, San Marino,
California). His portrait Mr. and Mrs. Andrews
(1750?, National Gallery, London) is unusually
balanced between portrait and landscape painting.
Thomas Gainsborough by Martin Myrone (Editor),
Michael Rosenthal (Editor) – Hardcover: 272 pages Publisher:
Harry N Abrams (March 1, 2003)
Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) was one of the masters of
18th-century art. This stunning book, published to accompany
a major international exhibition, covering the artist's entire
career, reveals the sheer range, quality, and originality
of Gainsborough's work, from his engagingly naturalistic landscapes
and touching images of children to his sophisticated and glamorous
society portraits.
In their revealing essay, Michael Rosenthal and Martin Myrone
explore Gainsborough's dynamic involvement with the social
world of his day, while other essays explore his subtle approach
to the lucrative world of fashionable portraiture and the
often pointed social commentary behind his seductive landscapes.
This volume provides new and refreshing insights into Gainsborough
as an artist who succeeded in creating an experimental and
modern art for his own time, and whose works remain vital
and rewarding today.
NOTE: Also available in a six-disc
boxed set featuring Gainsborough, Blake,
Reynolds, Constable, Hogarth, Turner
Possibly the greatest-ever English portraitist and landscape
artist of 18th century England, Thomas Gainsborough had undoubtedly
the most famous individual image. The celebrated Blue Boy
is just one of hundreds of powerfully impressive images created
by Gainsborough. By the middle of his life, he was a master
at depicting the men, women and children of his day, and his
genius made him a wealthy man. However, Gainsborough’s
real passion was landscape painting and he worked in both
genres throughout his life. The Fancy Pictures created
towards the end of his career, were a result of combining
landscape and portraiture, which are now seen by many as his
greatest achievement.
This fascinating program includes all new location footage
including visits to Gainsborough’s houses in Sudbury,
Suffolk, Bath and inspirational London locations, re-creations
and reconstructions, studies of the great works and commentaries
and analyses from leading authorities, art historians and
scholars.
Thomas
Gainsborough (British Artists) by Martin Postle –
Paperback: 80 pages Publisher: Princeton University Press
(January 6, 2003)
Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), admired for his grand society
portraits and sumptuous pastoral landscapes, is the most perennially
popular of British artists. In his life as in his art, Gainsborough
sought to project an image of effortless accomplishment, demonstrated
by a dazzling painting technique and immense personal charm.
He was also competitive, opinionated, and financially astute.
Because he was among the most innovative and enigmatic artists
of his age, the true nature of his achievement is at once
greatly appreciated and insufficiently understood.
This illustrated introduction to the artist and his work traces
Gainsborough's career from his boyhood in rural Suffolk to
the pinnacle of commercial success at the court of George
III. Martin Postle examines the tremendous impact on Gainsborough's
career of the Royal Academy and the Court of St. James. Postle
also reassesses the artist's attitudes toward the central
aspects of his art: portraiture (which he called his profession)
and landscape (which he called his pleasure). While revealing
Gainsborough in the light of his own day, this attractive
book also highlights the timelessness of his work--the celebrated
brushwork, lyrical composition, and almost miraculous use
of color.
The
Paintings of Thomas Gainsborough by Malcolm Cormack
– Paperback: 198 pages Publisher: Cambridge University
Press; Reprint edition (February 26, 1993)
This is the first introduction to the art and life of Thomas
Gainsborough to appear for many years. Gainsborough has long
been an attractive and popular figure in the history of English
art, but this book shows that he was more than the well-known
painter of The Blue Boy and the perennial rival to Joshua
Reynolds. His role as a prototype for the modern idea of "the
artist as Romantic" is discussed, while his deep knowledge
of the art of the past is revealed to demonstrate his eclectic
yet individual reworking of older styles. An introduction
and seventy-five carefully selected paintings and drawings
explain Gainsborough's life and art and his important role
in the development of an independent English school. Both
text and illustrations provide a unique up-to-date and perceptive
survey that will be of interest to the scholar and general
reader alike.
Gainsborough (World of Art)
by William Vaughan – Paperback: 224 pages Publisher:
Thames & Hudson (June 1, 2002)
Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) is one of the most appealing
English artists of the eighteenth century. Renowned for such
elegant portraits as The Blue Boy and Countess Howe, he also
pioneered a new form of landscape with a moody sensibility
that prefigured the Romantic movement. A brilliant draftsman,
his art is full of inventiveness and visual delight. Drawing
upon recently discovered material, William Vaughan provides
a fresh perspective on both the life and art of this master.
He shows how closely Gainsborough's innovative manner can
be connected to social and political developments in Britain,
in particular the celebration of original genius in a time
of burgeoning entrepreneurial commercialism. Above all, he
demonstrates how, beneath the artist's charm, there lay a
bedrock of shrewd observation and pictorial intelligence that
gives his work a value for all time. 176 illustrations, 61
in color.
This handsome gift volume reveals the stories behind the Huntington's
best-known paintings, The Blue Boy by Thomas Gainsborough
and Pinkie by Sir Thomas Lawrence. Who were the children in
these paintings and why did these leading artists choose them
as subjects? Wark, retired curator of the Huntington art collections,
answers a number of questions about these famous paintings.
Late in his career Thomas Gainsborough became preoccupied with
the theme of the cottage door, and he created a group of paintings
and drawings that show rustic figures clustered around the open
door of a cottage set in a deeply wooded landscape. Often seen
as exemplars of the rural idyll, these works were among the
first landscape paintings to reflect the eighteenth-century
aesthetic of sensibility. As a way of seeing, sensibility valued
nature for its innocence and simplicity, and images, such as
Gainsborough’s cottage subjects, for their power to move
the viewer.
This lovely book brings together the cottage door paintings
and essays that discuss Gainsborough’s departure from the
more naturalistic style of his earlier career and that place
his new concern with sentimentalism and artificiality in the
context of sensibility and the growing interest in expressive,
even sensational, visual spectacles. To this end, contributors
to the volume investigate new viewing practices associated with
sensibility, the meaning of the cottage for Gainsborough and
his contemporaries, the artist’s creation of affecting
landscapes through the use of peasant subjects, and his theatrical
treatment of these subjects in order to heighten his viewers’
emotional responses.
Thomas
Gainsborough: A Country Life by Hugh Belsey, Thomas
Gainsborough – Hardcover: 96 pages
Publisher: Prestel Publishing (October 1, 2002)
This new study on Thomas Gainsborough concentrates on the early
life and works of the great eighteenth-century artist. Gainsborough’s
talent was evident at a young age, and before he established
himself as one of London’s leading portrait artists he
was able to indulge himself in his true passion, landscapes,
as well as providing portraits for a provincial clientele.
Graced with the light and gentle shadows of the English countryside,
these early works provided the foundation for much of Gainsborough’s
later work. But many of them, including the renowned Mr.
and Mrs. Andrews, and His Daughters Chasing a Butterfly,
can be called masterpieces in their own right. It was in Suffolk
that the artist developed a naturalistic approach to portraiture
by abandoning "conversation pieces" and painting instead
a number of straightforward head-and-shoulder portraits. This
lively and accessible volume features eighty color and black-and-white
reproductions of Gainsborough’s paintings, etchings, and
drawings. They not only shed light on the development of one
of England’s most revered painters, but also offer an intimate
look at the work of a young painter in the thrall of his subjects,
and just beginning to realize his full talents.
When Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) arrived in the spa town
of Bath, England, at the age of thirty-one, he was an artist
of modest reputation. When he left sixteen years later, he was
recognized as one of Europe's foremost painters. In this exceptional
book, Susan Sloman examines for the first time how this transformation
took place. She offers an entirely new view of Gainsborough's
development during his middle years as well as abundant new
information about Bath and its role, for a few decades in the
eighteenth century, as a cultural center of Europe.
Drawing on freshly discovered documents and a variety of little-known
contemporary published sources, Sloman illuminates artistic
activity in Bath and Gainsborough's part in it. She reveals
how Gainsborough's prominence as an artist and Bath's as a cultural
hub were intimately connected during a period in which the artist
and his town flourished together.
In this sumptuously illustrated book, Michael Rosenthal provides
a lively account of Thomas Gainsborough's varied life and diverse
artworks. Rosenthal examines the artist's portraits, landscapes,
and fancy pictures, works of extraordinary beauty and complexity.
The book also considers for the first time Gainsborough's entire
body of works and how his career reflected problems and situations
common among painters in eighteenth-century England.
Perhaps the greatest of all English artists,
Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) was born
in the small town of Sudbury on the river Stour
in Suffolk. His house is now both a museum and
a research center for Gainsborough studies.
It holds an outstanding collection of paintings,
drawings, prints, books, and memorabilia relating
to the artist and his time. This book presents
both the highlights of this collection, which
has not hitherto been published, and significant
new research and insights relating to Gainsborough’s
art, character, and career.
Works in the collection include fine examples
by Gainsborough himself at all stages of his
career, along with paintings and engravings
by the artist’s mentors, Francis Hayman
and Hubert-Francois Gravelot, and by his followers,
notably his nephew Gainsborough Dupont and Thomas
Rowlandson, and by other East Anglian artists,
including John Constable.
Hugh Belsey is curator of Gainsborough’s
House. He has published widely on Gainsborough
and other 18th-century artists, most recently
Gainsborough: A Country Life.
Thomas
Gainsborough
by John Hayes Paperback: 158 pages Publisher:
Tate Gallery (1980)
Catalog for exhibition held Oct. 8 1980-January
4 198 1. Superb 18th-century draftsmanship.
Illustrated by b/w & color repros. 1st paper
edition. Lists his drawings, prints, the early
years in London and Suffolk 1745-59; The years
of Maturity Bath 1759-74; The London Period
1774-88.
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Thomas Gainsborough
Color, Dolby, NTSC 
Color, NTSC
The
Paintings of Thomas Gainsborough
Gainsborough (World of Art)
Best Loved Paintings: Pinkie and Blue Boy
by Susan Sloman Hardcover: 272 pages Publisher: Paul Mellon
Center BA (November 1, 2002)
The Art of Thomas Gainsborough : "A Little Business
for the Eye"
Gainsborough at Gainsborough's House
Thomas
Gainsborough
by John Hayes Paperback: 158 pages Publisher:
Tate Gallery (1980)
