Painting. World artists. Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788)

The most accomplished and the most influential English painter of the eighteenth century was Thomas Gainsborough. Until 1774 Gainsborough painted landscapes and portraits in various provincial centres before settling in London for the last fourteen years of his life. Although the elegant attenuation of his lords and ladies is indebted to his study of Van Dyck, Gainsborough achieved in his full-length portraits a freshness and lyric grace all his own. Occasional objections to the lack of structure in his weightless figures are swept away by the beauty of his colour and the delicacy of his touch. The figure in Mary Countess Howe, painted in the mid-1760s, is exquisitely posed in front of a landscape background. Gainsborough has expended his ability on the soft shimmer of light over the embroidered organdy of her overdress and cascades of lace at her elbows, sparkling in the soft English air; the only solid accents in the picture are her penetrating eyes. Although Gainsborough was country-born, his landscape elements seem artificial, added like bits of scenery to establish a spatial environment for the exquisite play of colour in the figure.
In later life Gainsborough painted more freely and openly. Although his landscapes, which he preferred to his portraits, exhale a typically English freshness, they were painted in the studio on the basis of small models put together from moss and pebbles. Constructed in the grand manner of Hobbema, a seventeenth-century Dutch master, and painted with soft strokes of wash like those of Watteau, the Market Cart, of 1787, shows an almost rhapsodic abandonment to the mood of nature, which led to the great English landscapists of the early nineteenth century.
Constable said that Gainsborough's landscape moved him to tears, and contemplating the freedom and beauty of the painting of the cart and a boy gathering brushwood, not to speak of the glow of light seeming to come from within the tree in the centre, one can understand why.

Literature: Book "Western European art" A.P. Minyar-Belorucheva