Explaining his approach to portraiture, Gainsborough wrote in a letter to Lord Dartmouth that, 'likenesses the principal beauty & intention of a portrait', a statement that seems so obvious in the age of the selfie that it hardly needs repeating. The error was corrected and the collar was painted out. Gainsborough's disinterest in social status is perhaps best served in the portrait of Lord Aylesford, who wished to be portrayed in peers robes and Gainsborough erroneously included a Garter collar – which the sitter had no business to wear. This direct approach was unlike the rhetoric of Reynolds, who intended to give his sitters status with the metaphors of the Olympian gods. He regarded drawing as an extension of seeing, and through the act of drawing his images became a part of his visual memory which he could use to draw on in details in his paintings. He had a yearning curiosity that was only satisfied by a constant sketching, by which he was able to understand the way trees grew, the way dappled light illuminated a copse or the way a pathway delineated the recession in a landscape. This patina makes Gainsborough's artistic character particularly difficult to define.Ģ50 years after Gainsborough painted his last picture, art historians have to pick up the pieces to recreate his artistic personalityĪrguably Gainsborough was blessed with more natural ability than any of his contemporaries in Britain. Gainsborough's link with female beauty encouraged advertisers to use his name to promote ladies' cigarettes, cosmetics including powder compacts and even a 'Gainsborough Genuine Hair Net: The Net of the Life-like Lustre'. The taste for Gainsborough straddled the Atlantic, where robber barons such as Henry Clay Frick and Henry Edwards Huntington bought exceptional examples in the early twentieth century. Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) English Heritage, Kenwood
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