Thomas Gainsborough

With a major exhibition, the opening of a centre dedicated to his art, and the return of his Blue Boy , 2022 is shaping up to be the year of Gainsborough, says ADRIAN MOURBY

- ADRIAN MOURBY

King George III and Queen Charlotte; actors Sarah Siddons and David Garrick; Johann Christian Bach, Admiral George Rodney, and Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire. The defining personalities of 18th-century England have been fixed in our minds by the brilliant Thomas Gainsborough, the Suffolk portrait painter who would rather have been a landscape artist.

Along with his rival Sir Joshua Reynolds, Gainsborough was rightly considered one of the most important British artists working in Georgian London. In 1768 the two artists were among the 34 founders of the Royal Academy of Arts. Reynolds was the exponent of the Grand Style, idealising his sitters without losing a genuine likeness. By contrast, Gainsborough’s subjects seem more real to 21st-century eyes. Compare his portrait of the Duchess of Devonshire with that of his rival and they clearly depict the same woman, but Reynolds makes her a personification of beauty while Gainsborough makes her a person, someone who might cause real trouble if she put her mind to it.

Likewise, Gainsborough’s charming 1759 portrait of his young daughters, Molly and Peggy, has an immediacy about it, as if dad has just positioned them and they’re wondering how long this session is going to last. Fortunately for the girls, and indeed all his sitters, Gainsborough painted quickly, and the works of his maturity are characterised by a light palette and easy strokes.

With its air of historical unreality, his fancy-dressed Blue Boy from 1770 was a bit of an anomaly. The portrait is said to be a riposte to one of Reynolds’ Discourses on Art in which Sir Joshua declared that a painter should not amass too much blue in the foreground of a picture.