If a portrait ‘happened to be on the easel’, wrote Henry Angelo of Thomas Gainsborough, ‘he was in the humour for a growl at the dispensation of all sublunary things. If, on the other hand, he was engaged in a landscape composition, then he was all gaiety – his imagination was in the skies.’ What Angelo doubtless meant was that the painter’s creativity rose like a balloon into the air. But, looking at Gainsborough’s work assembled at Tate Britain in a huge retrospective (until 19 January), one might be excused for taking his words literally.
Take a step back from the early paintings in the first room, and you become overwhelmingly aware of their skies. At this stage, the young painter was clearly under the influence of 17th-century Dutch masters, Ruisdael especially, but his cloudscapes are personal and touching. Tender, dove-grey as much as blue, with a Mozartian mixture of sunshine and shadow, in some cases darkening to mulberry with approaching rain, they give drama and emotional tone to the pictures. As John Constable – another great painter from East Anglia – later put it, the sky is ‘the chief organ of sentiment’ in each of these little paintings.
This was also the case quite often later on, when Gainsborough had become a fashionable portraitist in Bath and London. Captain William Wade, Master of Ceremonies at the Bath Assembly Rooms, stands tall and foppish in front of a huge expanse of light and air with only a bracket of classical stone separating him from infinity. Mary, Countess Howe is illuminated – as if by a flash of lightning or ray of sunset – against a rapidly gathering storm. Behind Isabella, Viscountess Molyneaux, the heavens are even darker.
Some of my critical colleagues have grown equally thundery in contemplating the words that accompany this exhibition.
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