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Updated: June 13, 2025
We have a good many stories of Gainsborough's bad manners. The artists of his day tried to treat him with every consideration, but in return he treated them very badly, especially Sir Joshua Reynolds.
For an estimate of Thomas Gainsborough both in regard to his place in the story of the English School and to the abilities and methods by which he attained it, it is needless to look elsewhere than to that of Sir Joshua Reynolds, contained in the discourse delivered shortly after Gainsborough's death:
The restoration of that beautiful painting has destroyed the delicate charm of its coloring, which was perfectly harmonious, and has as far as possible made it coarse and vulgar: before it had been spoiled, not even Sir Joshua's "Tragic Muse" seemed to me so noble and beautiful a representation of my aunt's beauty as that divine picture of Gainsborough's.
The writer regards his petty affairs as of prime importance to the world, and he shows with great care, and not a single flash of wit, how all of Thomas Gainsborough's success in life was brought about by Thicknesse. And then, behold! after Thicknesse had made the man by hand, all he received for pay was ingratitude and insolence!
With Hogarth's idea that a picture should teach a lesson and have a moral, he had no sympathy. And with Reynolds, who thought there was nothing worth picturing but the human face, he took issue. Beauty to him was its own excuse for being. However, in all of Gainsborough's landscapes you find the human interest somewhere man has not been entirely left out.
I was fast learning how to sympathize with him. Then to Grosvenor House to see the pictures. I best remember Gainsborough's beautiful Blue Boy, commonly so called, from the color of his dress, and Sir Joshua's Mrs. Siddons as the Tragic Muse, which everybody knows in engravings.
I have seen nobody to-day to tell me what passed there. I have been with Mie Mie at Gainsborough's, to finish her picture. I thank you for inquiring after her; it has been one of my comforts that she has escaped any of these colds. She seems to grow very strong; so far, so good. I think verily he grows more tiresome every day, and everybody's patience is a bout, except Smith's and Sir George's.
In a quite little street running between the Fulham and the King's Road, in a row of small houses not yet improved out of existence, there was one house smallest of all, with the smallest front, the smallest back, and the smallest garden. The whole thing was almost impossibly small, a peculiarity properly reflected in the rent which Mr Gainsborough paid to the firm of Sloyd, Sloyd, and Gurney for the fag-end of a long lease. He did some professional work for Sloyds from time to time, and that member of the firm who had let Merrion Lodge to Mina Zabriska was on friendly terms with him; so that perhaps the rent was a little lower still than it would have been otherwise; even trifling reductions counted as important things in the Gainsborough Budget. Being thus small, the house was naturally full; the three people who lived there were themselves enough to account for that. But it was also unnaturally full by reason of Mr Gainsborough's habit of acquiring old furniture of no value, and new bric-
Painted, for aught we know, at the artist's usual rate, when in confinement, "four-guineas per day with his drink." Landscape. Gainsborough. Stamped, as Mr. Cunningham says, all Gainsborough's works are, "with the image of old England." Sir W. Curtis, Bart. Lawrence.
Now, Gainsborough's portraits were often little more in regard to finishing or determining the form of the features, than what generally attends a first painting; but as he was always attentive to the general effect, or whole together, I have often imagined that this unfinished manner contributed even to that striking resemblance for which his portraits are so remarkable."
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