Thomas Gainsborough, like the poet with the two mistresses
Young Gainsborough: Rediscovered Landscape Drawings, open until June 12th in the Print Gallery of the National Gallery of Ireland, displays a group of 25 drawings firmly attributed to Thomas Gainsborough less than a decade ago by art historian Lindsay Stainton who, in a ‘Aha! Eureka’ moment, connected one of the drawings to a painting now in the collection of the National Gallery in London – Cornard Wood, near Sudbury, Suffolk (1748). Previously the drawings were thought to be the work of Edwin Henry Landseer, one of painters favoured by Queen Victoria, as they were found in the artist’s studio immediately after he passed in 1873.
But for two small and full-of-promise (Gainsborough was only seventeen when he made them) portraits on vellum, the 25 ‘lost’ drawings are all black and white chalk on buff paper, have similar size, format and – ahem – titles. If the outlined path is not winding, it is either ascending or descending. That said, not two drawings look alike as the subject may be the same, but the point from which it is captured and therefore the overall composition differ. Besides, they are at various stages of completion with some being roughly sketched, others almost finished, and a few already squared and ready to be transferred on the canvas. They are genuine working drawings which allow viewers to follow how, through drawing, Gainsborough’s ideas took shape.
Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), Study for 'Cornard Wood', c. 1748. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2022
The drawing that brought about the discovery of the group, Study for ‘Cornard Wood’ (c. 1748), is exhibited in the last room of the Print Gallery, next to the painting of which it turned out to be the preparatory study. That alone should be enough to excite art professionals and enthusiasts alike as the opportunity to consider in tandem landscape paintings and drawings is rare. And yet, the work that made me pose longer is one of the four that, when the sheets of paper were removed from the album where they were housed in 1874 for the Royal Library, turned out to have a drawing on the verso too. It is displayed in the second room and shows the head of a young woman.
Trees beside a pond (recto); Study of a young woman, possibly Miss Lloyd of Ipswich (verso) seems to foretell how Gainsborough’s career would develop and how his personal arcadian approach to portraiture made him stand out from other contemporary portrait painters. Although Gainsborough’s first love was landscape painting, he found fame and made a living as a portrait painter. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Allan Cunningham noted in his biographical entry for the artist that ‘portrait painting, like the poet with the two mistresses, had his visits, but landscape and music had his heart’. He kept drawing and painting landscapes all his life, though, and chose to give one of them to the Royal Academy as an example of his life’s work.
Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), Trees beside a pond (recto), c. 1748 - c. 1750. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2022
Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), Study of a young woman, possibly Miss Lloyd of Ipswich (verso), c. 1748 - c. 1750. Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2022
But Gainsborough was still in his early twenties when he drew the works featured in the exhibition. The young hopeful artist had just returned from London to his native Sudbury in Suffolk and might have been thinking that the ability of earning a living as a landscape painter was still within the bounds of possibility. Soon he would have to come to grips with the fact that the only landscape painters popular on the English market were those of the Dutch Golden Age.
Gainsborough studied, and later in life collected, the works of the Dutch seventeenth century landscape painters. From the most celebrated, Jacob van Ruisdael, he took the idea that we already see developed in these early drawings of focusing on one element of the composition.
One of the prints found in Gainsborough’s personal collection when he passed in 1788 - Ruisdael’s A cottage on a hill, c. 1660 - is exhibited in the last room. I wonder if this small Dutch cottage looked anything like the one the artist found later in life on Richmond Hill at the edge of London, and where he eventually retired in 1785 to follow his lifelong dream of painting landscapes.
