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Updated: June 3, 2025
Music was his passion, and whenever at the concerts held round about there the player did exceptionally well, Gainsborough would proffer a picture in exchange for the instrument used. In this way the odd corners of their house got filled with violins, lutes, hautboys, kettledrums and curious stringed things that have died the death and are now extinct.
These Tristrams were odd folk. There was the same blood in Cecily as had run in Addie Tristram's veins. On the other hand the Gainsboroughs seemed to have been ordinary. Was this period of indecision or of suspended action a time of struggle between the Tristram in Cecily and the Gainsborough?
George the Third saw them and sent word down that he wished Gainsborough lived in London, so he could sit to him. The carrier, Wiltshire, who packed the pictures and took them up to London, had a passion for art that filled his heart, and he refused to accept gold, that base and common drudge 'twixt man and man, for his services in an art way. And so Gainsborough presented him with a picture.
Now I will ask my readers to imagine my bringing the pictures "Le Linge" and "L'Enfant a l'Epee" over from France, and submitting them to the judgment of the Manchester Corporation. As well might I submit to them a Velasquez or a Gainsborough signed Smith and Jones!
Gainsborough and Bacon were the sons of cloth-workers; Barry was an Irish sailor boy, and Maclise a banker's apprentice at Cork; Opie and Romney, like Inigo Jones, were carpenters; West was the son of a small Quaker farmer in Pennsylvania; Northcote was a watchmaker, Jackson a tailor, and Etty a printer; Reynolds, Wilson, and Wilkie, were the sons of clergymen; Lawrence was the son of a publican, and Turner of a barber.
One had a little dog half hidden in the folds. The arch face of Nell Gwynne smiled over a door, a life-sized Gainsborough of a lady with a straw hat, reclining on a bank of flowers, was conspicuous over one fire-place. There were cavaliers with long, curled hair, gentlemen of a later date in pig-tails; but the most modern of all was a portrait of a boy playing with a large dog.
Such was the scene which I saw from the bridge, a scene of quiet rural life well suited to the brushes of two or three of the old Dutch painters, or to those of men scarcely inferior to them in their own style, Gainsborough, Moreland, and Crome.
If Gainsborough did not look at nature with a poet's eye, it must be acknowledged that he saw her with the eye of a painter; and gave a faithful, if not a poetical, representation of what he had before him.
We may admire Rubens and Rembrandt and Vandyke and Gainsborough and Turner, but who will dare to say that any one of their pictures is faultless? We shall learn much from them all, but quite as much what to avoid as what to emulate. But when you discover their faults, do not forget their virtues. Look, and realise what it means to be able to do so much, And the actor's art is even more difficult!
He has all the proper books of a gentleman's library, and all superbly bound. What does he know about them? He never read a book. He has marvellous pictures. What does he know of pictures? He doesn't know whether Gainsborough was a painter or a potter, or whether Giotto was a Greek or a Roman.
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