Thomas Gainsborough Research Articles

Materials analysis in three paintings of Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) by portable X-ray fluorescence

Three paintings of Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788), one of the most influential English portrait painters of the late 18th century, from the collection of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) - “Francis Rawdon” (1783–1784), “Portrait of Mrs. John Bolton” (1770), and “Drinkstone Park” (1747) - were investigated using portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF), employing a W tube anode and an XR-100CR detector. These artworks represent the only paintings by Thomas Gainsborough located in the southern hemisphere. Through an analysis of the behavior of X-ray line net areas for all identified elements in various regions of the oil paintings, it was observed that XRF accurately identified the original materials: Lead White, Calcium Carbonate, Calcium Sulfate, Bone Black, Ivory Black, Yellow Iron Oxide, Prussian Blue, Vermillion, Red Iron Oxide, Umber, and Sienna Earth. Additionally, certain regions exhibited the presence of 19th century pigments: Zinc White, Cobalt Blue, and Chrome Yellow, indicating areas that had undergone restoration. The findings presented in this study align closely with results obtained from other investigations into paintings by Thomas Gainsborough.

Claude Chamber

Proto-photographic and proto-cinematic technologies are an unending source of inspiration for a visual artist. We want to consider the case of an eighteenth-century optical device, the Claude mirror, as a starting point for an artistic collaboration.
 The Claude mirror is a small black convex mirror named after the painter Claude Lorrain and used by late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century painters and travellers for viewing landscapes. The dark mirror surface produces an image with a limited tonal range, allowing the viewer to look at the environment as if it were a painting. A famous Thomas Gainsborough drawing shows a man seated on a bank with a sketchbook on his lap and holding an oval mirror propped against a tree branch (Gainsborough, 1750-55).
 In spring 2019, in a flash of joint inspiration, we conceived a method of combining aspects of our artistic processes: Salla’s moving image and Laura’s printmaking practice. For 18 months, we captured photographic time-lapse sequences of everyday views from the backyards of our studios, residencies, and homes as reflections on the surface of copper plates installed in the environment (Myllylä and Vainikka, 2021). In the resulting installation, titled Claude Chamber, we projected the video sequences on the gallery space, reflected via the same mirror surfaces, and the projected images became distorted and spatial.
 We were intrigued by this optical device, in which characteristics of photography and printmaking meet. One can think of a Claude glass as a predecessor of the camera viewfinder, an early photographic gesture. It can also be viewed as a printing plate, a matrix reflecting a view. In a traditional printing plate, the image is attached or fastens itself onto the surface of the plate; in our installation, the image is transient and moving.

Thomas Gainsborough’s “Carelessness”: Portraiture, Technique and Individuality

This article delves into Thomas Gainsborough’s distinctive painting style, characterised by fluid, expressive brushwork, and how it was perceived by his contemporaries as a form of “carelessness.” By revealing the mechanics of his craft, Gainsborough simultaneously inscribed his work within the prestigious lineage of the Old Masters, while also redefining the concepts of portraiture and identity. The article explores the historical lineage of his technique, noting that Gainsborough’s “odd scratches,” as described by Joshua Reynolds, are reminiscent of a painting tradition identified by the art historian Nicola Suthor as “bravura.” Yet it also addresses a specific cultural context by discussing the perceived femininity of Gainsborough’s style and its significant role in shaping the evolving concept of individuality during the late 18th century. The article argues that Gainsborough’s deliberate “studied carelessness” contributed to the new regime of individuality prevalent in the age of sensibility. Furthermore, it examines the influence of Gainsborough’s technique in shaping a national art school in Britain and his impact on late Victorian artists, emphasising the dual nature of his style as both an expression of individual genius and a reflection of broader trends in British art.

Sociability and portraiture from William Hogarth to Thomas Lawrence

The period between 1730-1830 saw the rise of an English school of art, much later than the other schools on the European continent. English portrait painters played a crucial part in this evolution by deploying the art of portraiture in infinite variations, in search of a veracity and an intimacy whose contours and peculiarities they tirelessly strove to capture and render. Indeed, they radically transformed their chosen pictorial genre by transcribing onto canvas the new conceptions and perceptions of the individual which had emerged in the Age of Enlightenment. Sensitive to the new universalist values associated with the notions of identity, individuality and sociability, the British portraitists set out to represent the variety and diversity of human beings, moving away from ancient types and models to focus on the particular, singular, circumstantial personalities of the models. In this essay I try to present the narrative of this remarkable blossoming, focussing on the works of a series of exceptional artists—William Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, Thomas Lawrence—whose works provide us with a remarkable visual chronicle of the evolutions of men, women and children in this rich moment in European history.

Scribleriana Transferred: Portraits, Manuscripts, and Books, 2020–2022.

Scribleriana Transferred: Portraits, Manuscripts, and Books, 2020–2022.

The 18th-Century Common. A Public Humanities Website for Enthusiasts of 18th-Century Studies

Reviewed by: The 18th-Century Common. A Public Humanities Website for Enthusiasts of 18th-Century Studies Mayron E. Cantillo Lucuara Mayron E. Cantillo Lucuara. Review: The 18th-Century Common. A Public Humanities Website for Enthusiasts of 18th-Century Studies It is something of a truism to claim that the web cannot be understood as the all-encompassing archive of human reality and knowledge. Omniscience is not the right attribute to describe the web. When viewed as a Hegelian totality that contains all there is, the internet inevitably fails to fulfil all standards. For this reason, it is more sensible, in conceptualising the nature of the digital world, to discard Hegel in favour of Kant with [End Page 175] his eighteenth-century conception of mind and reality. As a figurative technological brain, the internet does, obviously, offer some access to reality by encoding and decoding the world in all manner of computerised languages. However, its epistemic coverage cannot embrace it all: there are still countless layers of noumenal reality that lie beyond the reach of the digital, awaiting their potential computerisation. Access to those noumenal layers of knowledge has been one of the primary concerns in the burgeoning field of digital humanities (DH) in at least two senses. On the one hand, it is strikingly conspicuous that numerous textual realities of old remain "unprocessed" as "inaccessible materials,"1 thus calling for "new spaces for exploring humanity's cultural heritage and for imagining future possibilities using the transmedia methods and genres of the digital present."2 Said otherwise, much as the internet has grown into a vast encyclopaedia of knowledge, its reach still falls far short, leaving a whole horizon of uncharted textualities from the past. On the other hand, there is a further problem with the actual "accessibility of digital collections to both specialists and non-specialists alike."3 In multiple instances, old materials are rigorously processed, digitised, and made available in official repositories, yet their real availability is "marked by social and economic inequalities"4—with only a small number of subscribers having the prerogative to access and use them. For this reason, as Matthew Kirschenbaum rightly puts it, DH must work concertedly towards eliminating such inequalities and promoting "a culture that values collaboration, openness, nonhierarchical relations, and agility."5 Coincidentally enough, around the same year 2010 when Kirschenbaum published his article arguing for more democratic DH projects with egalitarian accessibility, a new website called The 18th-Century Common came into existence in the very democratic spirit of sharing up-to-date research and general knowledge on the history and culture of the long eighteenth century with "nonacademic readers … in accessible, nonspecialized language." The website's name is in itself aptly eloquent and symbolic: it echoes the historical idea of common land, i.e., a hybrid estate of private ownership that is offered for public usufruct. Transformed into a "symbol of open access for shared benefit," the English common goes digital and becomes a cyberspace where the eighteenth century is epistemically accessible and available to anyone, whether academically affiliated or independent, who wishes to keep up to date with new scholarship on the early modern period. So far, this cyber-common land has been able to attract more than 1,400 subscribers who have signed up for any news stories uploaded to the website. The titular notion of common land that the webpage champions is aesthetically reinforced by the appropriate painting displayed on the background. It is a canvas held at the Yale Center for British Art, dated from 1748–50, and painted by the famous British artist Thomas Gainsborough. It shows, as its title indicates, a wooded landscape with a nearly camouflaged cottage, a resting shepherd, and a modest flock of sheep and goats. This simple ekphrasis may say little per se, but it entails a coherent symbolic meaning: Gainsborough's large landscape, together with the limitless horizon in the background of the painting, lends itself to being regarded as the open space, the shared ground, or the democratic land that the website plants and cultivates in order unrestrictedly to gather all kinds of users interested in the eighteenth century. In other words, the space opened by [End...

Afacerea artei. Piața de artă în Marea Britanie în secolele XVII -XVIII

While the royal houses and the aristocracy of Italy, Low Countries, France and Spain had already an history in collecting pieces of art, Great Britain adopted this “fashion” only under Charles the 1st reign, in 17th century. Charles the 1st understood that his painted portraits, sculpted busts and a royal collection of art could bring a higher value to his royal status and this practice was representing the power, the authority and the virtues of a king. He was a prodigious collector and made numerous acquisitions of paintings and statues. He collected the artworks of more than 1750 artists; that formed the basis of Royal Collection, the greatest private collection nowadays. The reign of Charles the 1st was highly significant for the appearance of “Court Painters”, who also had the quality of diplomats at various European courts. Peter Paul Rubens and Antoon Van Dyck have been highly appreciated at the court of Charles the 1st. In his artworks Van Dyck captured the “flamboyant” spirit of the time; he gave brilliance to his characters and transformed significantly the image of the King, providing him a special refinement, as it can be seen in the portraits he painted to Charles the 1st. The next century was marked by painters such as William Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough. Hogarth was considered „the most famous painter in London”, and he brought his important contribution to the establishment of a copyright law. His printed graphic series and satirical paintings have been inspired from the social and political reality of his time. Aristocracy’s and bourgeoisie’s emancipation in the 18th century led to the flourishing of the portraiture. Reynolds and Gainsborough were the most desired painters when it came about making portraits and their fame transcended their time. Keywords: collection, Great Britain, Royal Painter, portrait, art power

Making The Modern Artist: Culture, Class and Art‐Educational Opportunity in Romantic Britain. By MartinMyrone. Yale: Yale University Press. 2020. 288 p. £45 (hb). ISBN 9781913107154.

In Making The Modern Artist, Martin Myrone examines the art education offered at the Royal Academy Schools and its students' contingent careers during the years from its opening in 1769 until 1830, dates chosen to represent three generations of Academy artists during the Romantic period. He sets out terms for nothing less than ‘a new history of this period of British art’ (p.1). The book evaluates the ramifications of a developing liberal modernity for the lives and opportunities of artists, and teases apart the narrative of individualism and creativity which emerged around 1800 and continues to impact society's expectations of artistic production. The book has its origins in Myrone's essay in Living with the Royal Academy: Artistic Ideals and Experiences in England, 1768-1848 (eds. Sarah Monks, John Barrell and Mark Hallett, Ashgate, 2013, Ch.8) in which he states that ‘The Academy was a product of, and articulated (however unwittingly), the specifically capitalist formations of the artist with which we live in the modern age’ (p.173). Myrone's concentrated and meticulous research into who accessed art educational resources and who was rewarded for their efforts is reflected in many of his recent publications, for example ‘A Survey of Premiums Offered for Historical Art, 1760-99’ (William Shipley Group for RSA History, Occasional Papers No.13, 2009) and ‘Drawing after the Antique at the British Museum, 1809-1817: “Free” Art Education and the Advent of the Liberal State’, British Art Studies, Issue 5 (2017). Making the Modern Artist expands on his 2013 findings, encapsulates his exhaustive investigations, and eschews the familiar biographical narratives that foreground iconic artists such as William Blake and Thomas Gainsborough, narratives which have nevertheless provided substantial subject matter for Myrone's writing. He draws on Marxist and Weberian sociology, and in particular on Bourdieu, ‘whose methodological practice provides a guiding spirit for this study’ (p.9). He reserves specific indignation for the neat conclusions offered by Holger Hoock in The King's Artists: The Royal Academy and the Politics of British Culture, 1760-1840 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), in which artists' potential achievements are attributed to innate talent. Myrone suggests that this indulges in ‘a pervasive fiction about individual talent which sits at the heart of liberal modernity’ (p.57). In his conclusions, he returns to Hoock's assertions, refuting that ‘the market could provide justice, that the talented would rise, the untalented sink into the trades’ (p.188). A newly marketised liberal modernity, ‘freed’ from the old paternal or workshop ties of traditional artistic apprenticeship, was characterised instead by fraternal ties, often along divisive lines of gender, culture and class. Myrone emphasises the crucial factor of family financial support which enabled students to continue their studies and cushioned them from market instability, increasingly favouring those from a genteel or professional background. His statistics appear in stark line graphs, adding the authority of indisputable numbers to a subject which often relies on broad statement, anecdote and contemporary quotation. The book outlines the failure of the Academy teachers to actually teach, the complaints about bad lighting and facilities, and ‘a form of study which was interminable and largely non-linear’, assuming that students should be responsible for their own progress (p.29). Occasionally, Myrone's collected data is deliberately deployed to counter our assumptions. It transpires that his long descriptive list of artists' suicides which opens Chapter 4, ‘The Social Suffering of the Artist’, serves to counter the ‘tortured genius’ myth of the ‘self-contradicting logic of representative exceptionalism’ (p.185). He challenges the trope of the impoverished artist in his garret, an artistic bohemian identity that deflects from serious questioning of the social reality. The case studies and sumptuous illustrations, many of which offer unfamiliar and surprising details from a wide range of sources, are themselves compelling evidence of Myrone's commitment to the subject of the book. He emphasises that his research has developed outside the structures of teaching and institutional networks, and he thus sympathises with the ‘unofficial’ historians able to function independent of the demands of liberal modernity (p.219). He characterises the book as a result of his ‘passionate hobbyism’ (p.220). Because he emphasises this approach, he is able to be selective and unapologetic. At times dwelling on intense close readings of images, and at others stating carefully argued criticism of the values and assumptions of current art historical scholarship, he conveys personal empathy with the lesser known artists who failed in their efforts to achieve success and recognition in their chosen careers. The book as such is a landmark in art history, exploring the outer reaches of artistic endeavour, and boldly re-examining the political and sociological impact of the Royal Academy's celebrated undertaking to foster the development of artistic excellence.

Thomas Cole’s Double View of Mount Holyoke

When Thomas Cole first unpacked his easel in the Catskill Mountains, and began to paint the scenes that would make him America’s most influential landscape artist, there was still a close relationship between the United States and Britain. Though the War of 1812 was a bitter conflict regarding all remaining British claims to North America, it had ended in stalemate a decade earlier and neither side was in the mood for another war. Instead, the two countries had agreed to an ongoing series of negotiations to settle their differences. Comity and compromise were the order of the day. Coincidentally, so was landscape painting. Artists such as John Constable and J.M.W. Turner were just the latest lights in what was already, in Ann Bermingham’s words, a ‘golden age of English landscape painting’ that began with Thomas Gainsborough.1 Could anything be more inspiring to a painter like Cole...

Mixing, dipping, and fixing: the experimental drawing techniques of Thomas Gainsborough

The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, owns twenty-five works on paper by the 18th-century English artist Thomas Gainsborough. Scholarly publications over the past 20 years, as well as Gainsborough’s own writings, have highlighted his proclivity toward innovative methods and experimentation. In particular, a letter that the artist wrote in 1773 reveals details of his secret recipe for making oils on paper, such as his recommended use of lead white and the unorthodox practice of dipping his works in skim milk, possibly to prevent the pigments from discoloring. About a dozen of Gainsborough’s creations were included in a 2018 exhibition at The Morgan entitled Thomas Gainsborough: Experiments in Drawing. On this occasion, an in-depth scientific study aimed to explore the artist’s work as a draftsman, with a special focus on his mastery of materials, his technical innovations, and his development of an original approach to drawing. Initially, a selection of artworks was examined using magnification along with transmitted and raking light to improve surface visualization and to investigate the structure of each piece. Further photographic documentation with ultraviolet and infrared light was performed to gather preliminary information on the variety of white pigments employed, on the wet and dry chalk techniques used in certain works, as well as on the possible presence of coatings and underdrawings. Subsequently, scientific analysis by means of X-ray fluorescence (XRF) and Raman spectroscopies aimed at characterizing the white pigments present in The Morgan’s drawings, which mostly consisted of calcite and lead white. Moreover, a combination of advanced micro-sampling tools, i.e. polyvinyl chloride (PVC)-free erasers and fine polishing films, ad-hoc sample preparation methods, highly sensitive proteomics analysis via nano-liquid chromatography/mass spectrometry (nano-LC/MS), and sophisticated bioinformatics data processing was employed to assess Gainsborough’s use of skim milk as a “secret fixative” on some of his works. Results have revealed the presence of specifically bovine milk in all of the samples evaluated to date. Notably, only through the combined use of such advanced technical resources can the interrogation of all milk proteins retrieved from the samples provide evidence for the presence of a milk fixative and open the discussion about milk processing methods in the 18th century. In addition to granting conservators and art historians a deeper understanding of the complexity of Gainsborough’s drawing techniques, this study paves the way for further investigations to probe the use of casein-based fixatives by other artists working on paper such as Degas and Van Gogh.

John Ruskin, Claude Lorrain, Robert Smithson, Christopher Tunnard, Nikolaus Pevsner, and Yve-Alain Bois walked into a bar . .

John Ruskin, Claude Lorrain, Robert Smithson, Christopher Tunnard, Nikolaus Pevsner, and Yve-Alain Bois walked into a bar . . John Dixon Hunt (bio) . . . for a conversazione on the modernity of the picturesque. Everybody knows Ruskin, though few read him; Lorrain was a famous painter and was responsible (though it was not his fault) for being imitated by painters and gardeners throughout the eighteenth century; Smithson, who died in 1973, was a famous land artist and writer; Tunnard, who wrote on modern gardening and tried to tie it to its previous history, taught at Harvard and Yale; Pevsner was a modernist architectural critic who was nevertheless fascinated by the picturesque; Bois is a distinguished art historian at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.1 For Emily Ruskin began by observing, rightly, that “Probably no word in the language (exclusive of theological expressions) has been the subject of so frequent or so prolonged dispute; yet none remain more vague in their acceptance . . .” It was, essentially, a question of how the term, the word “picturesque,” could or should be invoked, given its utter uselessness in the hands of journalism, a bland and empty gesture towards something undefined. So it was a debate about the word. Robert Smithson said it had been “struck by [End Page 81] lightning over the centuries,” but that the topic had been dismissed by “timid academics”; Yve-Alain Bois concurred. Somebody mentioned Salvator Rosa, who was particularly fond of depicting tree trunks split by thunderbolts. Others in the crowd, mainly landscape architects, muttered that such aged and rotten trunks should be felled, pulped and used for fertilisers. But the vagueness—not to say the hostility—was countered by citing certain issues from the very beginning of the picturesque in the later seventeenth century, which the present-day world had neglected. Two related themes were raised, one etymological, the other related to the subject matter of the picturesque. Etymologically, the word had appeared first in northern Italy, and this usage was taken into English by William Aglionby’s Painting Illustrated of 1685, where he writes that some Italian painters were “working A la pittoresk, that is boldly.” This was therefore about how the artist worked—choosing relevant natural materials (scenery and even human physiognomy)—which could be represented with virile brushwork on the canvas or by the burin’s excavation of and printing from the engraved plate. The imagery therefore insisted on its own artifice, on the deliberate refusal of seeing the painting as a “natural” view through a window. A similar attitude was probably in the mind of A. J. Downing in mid-nineteenth century America, when he spoke of the picturesque as “an idea of beauty strongly and irregularly expressed.” Even Ruskin, who was not fond of Thomas Gainsborough, said that Gainsborough was said to have introduced “business for the eye” into his paintings (i.e., busyness, what the enthralled eye would relish in the forms of the paint and brushwork). There was general assent that the picturesque was inclined to relish the rough and unfinished in both subjects and their media; fragments were seized as part of the picturesque effect, since they reflected the effects of time, the time of both the artist’s activity and the evidence of temporal disruption and decay. Fragments found in natural terrain were especially admired: Smithson said it was exactly [End Page 82] this notion in Uvedale Price’s verbal description of a torn and fractured landscape that he had admired in Three Essays on the Picturesque: The side of a smooth green hill, torn by floods, may at first very properly be called deformed, and on the same principle, though not with the same impression, as a gash on a living animal. When a rawness of such a gash in the ground is softened, and in part concealed and ornamented by the effects of time, and the progress of vegetation, deformity, by this usual process, is converted into picturesqueness; and this is the case with quarries, gravel pits, etc., which at first are deformities, and which in their most picturesque state, are often considered as such by a levelling improver. But time was also a key element of the picturesque, since...

Life after death: the viola da gamba in Britain from Purcell to Dolmetsch

It is normally thought that the bass viol or viola da gamba dropped out of British musical life in the 1690s, and that Henry Purcell was the last composer to write for it. Peter Holman shows how the gamba changed its role and function in the Restoration period under the influence of foreign music and musicians; how it was played and composed for by the circle of immigrant musicians around Handel; how it was part of the fashion for exotic instruments in the middle of the century; and how the presence in London of its greatest eighteenth-century exponent, Charles Frederick Abel, sparked off a revival in the 1760s and 70s. Later chapters investigate the gamba's role as an emblem of sensibility among aristocrats, artists and intellectuals, including the Countess of Pembroke, Sir Edward Walpole, Ann Ford, Laurence Sterne, Thomas Gainsborough and Benjamin Franklin, and trace Abel's influence and legacy far into the nineteenth century. A concluding chapter is concerned with its role in the developing early music movement, culminating with Arnold Dolmetsch's first London concerts with old instruments in 1890. PETER HOLMAN is Professor Emeritus of Historical Musicology at Leeds University, and director of The Parley of Instruments, the choir Psalmody, and the Suffolk Villages Festival.

Thomas Gainsborough and the Modern Woman

A Favorite of the Demi-Reps: Thomas Gainsborough and the Modern Woman, by Benedict Leca A 'most extraordinary figure, handsome and bold.' Gainsborough's Portrait of Ann Ford 1760, by Aileen Ribeiro 'Virtue in a 'vicious age': Fashioning Feminine Identity in Eighteenth-Century London, by Amber Ludwig Re-fashioning Race: Grace Jones, Kehinde Wiley, & Ann Ford, by Leora Maltz, Ph.D Afterword, Julia Marciari-Alexande

Thomas Gainsborough and the modern woman

Thomas Gainsborough and the modern woman

P. M. Harman . The Culture of Nature in Britain, 1680–1860 . New Haven : Yale University Press . 2009 . Pp. xi, 393. $65.00.

The title of P. M. Harman's sweeping survey strongly recalls that of Keith Thomas's pioneering Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500–1800 (1983). And in a sense, the two books treat the same topic, although with large differences that cannot easily be attributed either to the progress of scholarship in the last quarter century or to the fact that Harman, unlike Thomas, is a historian of science. Perhaps the explanation lies simply in Raymond Williams's famous assertion that “nature” is one of the most complex words in the English language (Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society [1976]). Thomas's nature is concrete, robustly composed of its constituent animals, vegetables, and minerals. Harman's nature is more ethereal, embodied in the ideas of philosophers, writers, and artists. The structure of this book is thematic, with chapters on design, exploration, landscape (two), classification, color, and vital force, in addition to an introduction and a conclusion. Within each chapter, the organization is roughly chronological, although not rigidly so. Harman is similarly unconstrained by the titular dates of his book, and he frequently glances back as far as Roman and Greek antiquity. The chapters are also structured to highlight the importance of aesthetics. Each begins with the discussion of an image, most often an oil painting or watercolor. Thus Thomas Gainsborough's “Wooded Landscape with a Peasant Resting” (ca. 1747) introduces the chapter on picturesque landscape, and John Ruskin's “Chamonix: Rocks and Vegetation” (ca. 1854) begins that on romantic landscape. It is unfortunate that in a book with fewer illustrations than might have been anticipated, the most richly detailed are small and dark.

Appropriating Identity: William Hogarth, Thomas Gainsborough, and Britain’s Myth of the Self-Made Man

Britain’s self-made man was defined by taste, money, influence, and most importantly, middle-class rank in the early decades of the Industrial Revolution. During the mid-1700s, a change began to take place between the social classes, stripping the aristocracy of their role as Britain’s foremost connoisseurs and trendsetters. The shift from aristocratic indulgences to those of the newly wealthy middle class stemmed from a number of factors. For one, the economy was changing during the 18th-century. An industrial environment, which often included factories and workers, was the new-found key to the financial success of self-made men. As David Kutcha explains, “late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century English aristocrats lost control of the meanings of consumption, as political, economic, and clothing reformers succeeded in portraying aristocratic men as prodigal parasites living off of a virtuous and industrious nation” (135). To prove that the individuals in England’s highest social class were unworthy of their role as connoisseurs of taste, middle-class reformers attacked the aristocracy, declaring that the upper classes were unworthy of their status and were living off the successes provided by industry and self-made men.Portraiture created in Britain during the 18th- and 19th-centuries, particularly paintings by William Hogarth (1697-1764) and Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), exemplifies the myth of the self-made man, as well as the shift in social class dominance. Moreover, portraiture emphasizes the middle-class’s adoption of aristocratic visual language, while in turn depicting men as wealthy industrials who benefit the national economy and define the manly character of England. Although middle-class reformers were determined to prove that the titled class was effeminate and parasitic, it was the aristocratic ideal of masculinity that the middling ranks adopted as their own. English artists Hogarth and Gainsborough were influential in addressing the tension produced by the shifting social lines of the Industrial Revolution. Bound to Britain’s wealth for their own survival, both Hogarth and Gainsborough sought the patronage of the rising middle-class while sustaining their own notions of the self-made myth.

Portrait of General Giles by Joseph Wright

<i>Portrait of General Giles</i> by Joseph Wright

A Gainsborough Sitter Identified: John Hobart, 2nd Earl of Buckinghamshire

The article suggests that the sitter in the c. 1784 painting Portrait of a Man, by Thomas Gainsborough, can be identified as John Hobart, 2nd Earl of Buckinghamshire, England. The author offers biographical information on Buckinghamshire, including his role as a diplomat in Russia where he was given a tapestry showing Peter the Great. The author discusses Buckinghamshire's commission of portraits of him and his wife by Gainsborough, including a small, head-and-shoulders portrait in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Specific topics include a possible Irish provenance for the painting and Buckinghamshire's costume shown in the painting.

Van Dyck &amp; Britain

Together with Holbein, Anthony van Dyck (1599 -1641) is one of the most important names in British pre-18th century art. Born in Antwerp he was a precocious talent, rising swiftly to become the chief assistant to Peter Paul Rubens, then Northern Europe's most prominent painter. His importance to British art cannot be overstated; during the turbulent years of the reign of Charles I, he single-handedly reinvented portrait painting, leaving behind a legacy that would influence later generations. Van Dyck first came to Britain in 1620 to work for James I. Between 1621 and 1627 he worked in Italy, adding to his clientele of wealthy patrons. Charles I recognised in van Dyck the potential to be the perfect creator of the royal image. The artist returned to London in April 1632 and was almost immediately knighted and provided with an enviable property and pension, becoming the chief painter of the court. His portraits of the royal family and courtiers, imbued with an understated authority and relaxed elegance, were an instant success. His pictures of Charles especially seemed to represent the king as both a powerful sovereign and 'nature's gentleman'. His popularity stemmed from his ease when moving in aristocratic circles, and his talent for flattering almost all subjects. Thomas Gainsborough famously said on his deathbed 'We are all going to heaven and van Dyck is of the company'. The authors not only explore van Dyck's years in England, but also his enduring influence on British art and culture in the centuries following his death, reflected in the way 18th and 19th century British sitters wanted their portraits to convey the gravitas and sophistication the earlier painter had mastered so well. Extensively illustrated, this is the most thorough examination ever published of van Dyck's English sojourn and the influence it had on the cultural life of the nation.

Invisibility Speaks: Servants and Portraits in Early Modern Visual Culture

This essay examines the relation between the genre of portraiture and the emergence of black identity from the vantage point of a cross-historical perspective. The range of artists extends from Hans Holbein, Anthony Van Dyck, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Jacob Jordaens and Karel van Mander III through Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, and Tiepolo to Derek Walcott and Glenn Ligon. Rather than imagining a series of increasingly positive steps organized as an upward linear trajectory toward freedom, the approach here envisions a jagged line of mixed outcomes and concentrates on testing the limits of portraiture as a mode of representation at each moment across multiple contexts. Instead of giving access to a fully satisfactory image of black identity, the portrait medium can be seen as developing an internal process of consciously questioning, exposing, and resisting its own limits.