Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Thomas Gainsborough
British (English); 18th-century
London, England: Kenwood House
82%
Greyhounds Coursing a Fox. 1785. Oil on canvas
A gallery attendant told me that this is a memento mori. The cancer that killed Gainsborough was in the back of his neck, right where the dog in this picture is biting the fox. Seems plausible, and if it's true — crazy. Crazy because this painting is so goddamn painterly. Typically, the problem with Gainsborough is that he doesn't let his hair down enough; he seems only ever to allow himself to Capital-P Paint within strict, decorous limits. But this piece, his personal death knell (it hung in his studio), explodes at the upper right inside of those trees. It has paint, too, gobbing up in the clouds; there's no logic besides that of raw tone and mass to the way the hills recede at left; the hounds (Gainsborough's cancer) are like emblems of brush strokes gliding across the canvas. But then so is the fox, which is just as lissome as the dogs, and more richly hued: painting is life, painting's also life's end. (Legend has it that Gainsborough's last two words were, "Van Dyck.") That said, this picture isn't worth celebrating wholesale. What Gainsborough's gained in expressive freedom, he's lost in brawn. The action takes place rather equivocally within the landscape; it's too lateral and leaves too much of what's behind it to chance. This is among Gainsborough's best paintings, but it puts his weaknesses on display. (TFS, 2025)
New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art
71%
Mrs. Grace Dalrymple Elliot. 1778. Oil on canvas
Gainsborough's handling is famous, but it may not be the great artistic triumph it initially seems. There's a lot less freeness in his brush than there at first appears to be, and what freeness there is, when you pay close attention to it, often ends up subordinating itself to — and thereby fails to adequately challenge or complexify (as pure paint does in, say, Tiepolo or Fragonard) — the scene it's a part of. Look at the tail of Grace's dress: an ample stack of paint, but only to the extent that the delicacy of the lacework on its right can bear — any wilder applied, those streaks of gold would have ruined the prim effect of Mrs. Elliot's hem. Ditto the highlights that cascade from her fingers and beside her brittle breast. Is there genius to the way Gainsborough balances an indulgence in his medium with the exigencies of making a picture? Of course there is. But does it ever threaten the beauty (I mean all disrespect) of this woman's rosy cheek? Never. (TFS, 2025)
St. Louis, MO: Saint Louis Art Museum
67%
View in Suffolk. c1755. Oil on canvas
Gainsborough's best when you can really see his brush at work. (His landscape compositions are too much like softened Claude to hold your interest in themselves.) You get a bit of his hand here where the riverbank cuts in to the left and then arcs out to face the front of the picture: those ochres in puddles and dabbling browns. The foliage at bottom right, too, is a small dark marvel of handling and tones. But though the scene hangs together perfectly well with its firm, unobtrusive arrangement (as English pictures tend to do), it fails to accomplish anything more than just hang together (as English pictures also tend to do). The bend of the river and the curve of the road lock into each low down the canvas and diverge towards the edges of the frame, where they're each held into the scene by a tree. Above this is a clean and too curtly delimiting horizon line, and above that are clouds floating atop a flat blue sky that grades slightly from light to dark. It's all so proper and clean — which if this were a modern painting would mean it's all so kitschy. (But it's not a modern painting.) (TFS, 2025)
London, England: Kenwood House
66%
Going to Market. c1770. Oil on canvas
There's something there in the warmth of the background against the backlit stuff in the foreground. That sky is a tonal master stroke, and there are worlds of color, despite their darkness, inside the figures before it. But you get the sense, as you do often with Gainsborough, that pure painting is an embarrassment, something that needs an apology (or at least a justification). In addition to the exorbitance of hue, there's that wonderfully brushy foliage — but before it the convoy is just a bit too posed, a bit too well-defined. Absent the figure group this might be a knockout landscape, but the caravan bogs it down. (TFS, 2025)