Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol.original_ [44]
Uncompromising honesty tinged with humor were the hallmarks of Hogarth’s art. He once said he would rather have “checked the progress of cruelty than been the author of Raphael’s [paintings].”
HOW TO TELL THEM APART
Gainsborough, “Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan,” c.1785, NG, Washington. In Gainsborough’s fashionable portraits, the sitter posed informally with a landscape background.
GAINSBOROUGH AND REYNOLDS: PORTRAITS OF THE UPPER CRUST. Two contemporaneous portrait painters of the era were Thomas Gainsborough (1727-88) and Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-92). Both were highly successful, painting thousands of elegant, full-length portraits of the British aristocracy. Their works often hang side by side in art galleries, easily confused because of their common subject matter. In many ways, however, they defined the distinction between informal and formal.
Reynolds, “Jane, Countess of Harrington,” 1777, Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, CA. Reynolds idealized his subjects, converting them to Classical deities.
GAINSBOROUGH: BACK TO NATURE. Gainsborough worshiped van Dyck. He learned from the master how to elongate figures to make them seem regal and set them in charmingly negligent poses to make them seem alive. Gainsborough refreshed British art with his loving portrayal of landscape backgrounds. He painted landscapes for his own pleasure, constructing miniature scenes in his studio of broccoli, sponges, and moss to simulate unspoiled nature. These did not sell, so Gainsborough had to content himself with inserting landscape backgrounds in his portraits.
In “Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan,” his subject was dressed informally, seated on a rock in a rustic setting (the painter wished to add sheep for a more “pastoral” air). The natural beauty of both the landscape and subject harmonize perfectly. The framing tree at right arcs into the painting to lead the eye back, while the curves of clouds and mid-ground tree, shrubs, hills, and skirt bring the focus back to the sitter’s face. This Baroque swirl of encircling eye movement repeats the oval of her face.
The leafy look of Gainsborough’s paintings helped establish the concept, taken up in earnest by nineteenth-century painters like Constable, that nature was a worthwhile subject for art.
REYNOLDS: HOMAGE TO ROME. Testimony of Reynolds’ devotion to the Grand Tradition is that he went deaf from spending too much time in the frosty rooms of the Vatican while sketching the Raphaels that hung there. While on the continent, he also caught a lifelong dose of “forum fever,” thereafter littering his portraits with Roman relics and noble poses. His dilemma was that, although he could get rich at “face painting,” only history painters were considered poets among artists. Reynolds tried to combine the two genres, finding fault with Gainsborough for painting “with the eye of the painter, not the poet.”
Reynolds was a champion of idealizing reality. In separate portraits both he and Gainsborough did of the actress Mrs. Siddons, Gainsborough showed her as a fashionable lady, while Reynolds portrayed her as a Tragic Muse enthroned between symbols of Pity and Terror. He so idolized such masters as Raphael, Michelangelo, Rubens, and Rembrandt he even painted his self-portrait costumed as the latter.
His portraits succeeded in spite of his pedantic self. “Damn him! How various he is!” Gainsborough exclaimed of this artist who could paint imposing military heroes, genteel ladies, and playful children with equal skill. Ironically, in his best portraits Reynolds ignored his own rules. Instead of idealizing what he termed “deficiencies and deformities,” he relied on an intimate, direct style to capture the sitter’s personality.
THE ROYAL ACADEMY AND THE GRAND MANNER
Modeled on the French Académie Royale, the British Royal Academy of Arts was founded in 1768 with Sir Joshua Reynolds as its first president. In his fifteen “Discourses” over the course of twenty years, Reynolds preached a strict code of rules based on Classicism. Artists were required