From what we know of him, Gainsborough never really liked his rich patrons, in fact, some say he loathed the upper classes. From his letters it would seem that he was patronised in every sense of the word. Indeed, he wrote to friends that most of his clients only had one part worth looking at and that was their purses. Gainsborough put up with these rich people for the money, it didn’t mean he had to like them. The rich had made him a celebrity artist, if you were ‘anyone’ in Georgian society you trotted along in your best togs to have your ‘likeness’ painted by him, and could then show it off to your pals . Gainsborough certainly churned the work out, he is reputed to have produced head and shoulder portraits in under 2 hours.
Lets have a look at the sort of people he painted. Around 1750 he painted a newly married couple from his native Sudbury. The double portrait now hangs in the National Gallery in London, it is of course the snappily titled, Mr and Mrs Andrews. It is known that Mr and Mrs A were both from wealthy families and the marriage brought their wealth together.
Gainsborough -National Gallery London
It is quite an odd picture and unfinished. The couple in question are painted on the left side of the picture, the other half of the painting is taken up with a view of their land, a view of ‘merrie’ England, were all was supposed to be harmony, and the land owner liked to be seen as part of the countryside he owned. But, has Gainsborough painted them as though they are ‘part of the land’? I don’t think so, they seem to be almost ‘superimposed’ onto a landscape, they jar the eye, they do not belong. She looks silly and awkward sitting on bench outside in a silk frock.
The Marxist writer John Berger says; They are not a couple in Nature as Rousseau imagined nature. They are landowners and their proprietary attitude towards what surrounds them is visible in their stance and expressions. Certainly, she has an odd expression, he just looks a bit dim and bored. There is not a worker to be seen, the invisible worker strikes again. However, the worker has left evidence of his existence in those lines in the land. Those lines show that Mr A was up to speed with cutting edge technology, oh yes, he had Jethro Tull’s seed drill. The seed drill in its self was contentious, the already landless labourers were worried it would make them redundant. Landowners like Mr Andrews were after bigger and better profits the plight of their workers and the rural poor wasn’t really on their minds, and Gainsborough knew this. Maybe that is why he has painted Mrs A with such an unpleasant look on her face.
Mr and Mrs Andrews do not belong to the land, the land belongs to them. The land had been taken away from the common man, and grazing rights etc. along with it. The industrial revolution had sparked change for all. But, a different kind of revolution, a kind that struck fear in the hearts of the likes of Mr and Mrs A was not far away, in 1789 the French Revolution had begun, after famines caused by agricultural practices and climate change – the little ice age. Later in 1791 Thomas Paine would write the rights of man, Mr and Mrs A must have feared they were on the way out.
The national Gallery blumph says that the unfinished space on Mrs A’s lap is left for a child. Wait a second though, is Mrs A holding a clue to what Gainsborough may have been intending to paint?
She is holding a bird’s feather, it might be from a bird Mr A has just shot, so why not put it in the painting ?
It would make her look like a countrywoman wouldn’t it?
Some say the reason the dead bird was not included and why the picture was unfinished, was because Mrs A knew the common reading of a dead bird in a picture. In Dutch art of the time it stood for a hen-pecked husband or a domineering woman. The National Gallery, wisely, play it safe
see the painting at the National Gallery http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/thomas-gainsborough-mr-and-mrs-andrews
