ArtWords: 'Gainsborough' by William Vaughan

'Lucid and sensible. . . out of this measured synthesis there emerges
a rather different artist than many of us have known.'
David Solkin, The Times Literary Supplement

Extract from the Introduction
We are lucky to have Gainsborough’s work still with us. It is both a delight in itself and a crucial record of the sensibilities that prevailed in British culture in the latter part of the eighteenth century, a key period in the history of the country when it was rising to become a leading European power and beginning to be admired throughout Europe
for what was (perhaps misguidedly) thought to be its liberal and progressive culture. Gainsborough — despite his personal conservative tendencies — was part of this stream of innovation. However, he was someone who was borne along by it, rather than being an initiator.

A modest man, he did not trust his own powers until they began to be evident to those around him. His rise to prominence was slow and during this rise he moved through several of the multifarious layers of the art practice of the period. This adds an interest for us. For we can find in him the jobbing provincial painter as well as the society portraitist he became after his move from his native Suffolk to Bath in 1759. At all stages of his career, furthermore, he produced works of outstanding and unusual quality — pictures that were as different from each other as the circumstances in which he operated. He was as changeable as a chameleon, but unlike a chameleon, his changes tended to make him more rather than less visible. The history of that visibility will form the subject of this book.

About the author
William Vaughan is Pevsner Professor of the History of Art at Birkbeck College, University of London. His is the author of numerous articles and books on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century painting, including Romanticism and Art and British Painting The Golden Age: from Hogarth to Turner both published by Thames & Hudson in the World of Art series. In 1998 he was chosen to deliver the Paul Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery, London, on the subject of British painting.

List of Contents
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The picture above is Gainsborough's Princess Elizabeth, c.1782.
The Royal Collection ©2001, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II