Thomas Gainsborough

Eighteenth-century portraitist and landscape artist Thomas Gainsborough's most recent retrospective reaffirms for a new generation his sturdy place in the mainstream of British art history. Born in Sudbury in 1727, Gainsborough went to London to study (first as a silversmith), where he ran with the smart set but struggled to sell work. Commissions grew when he moved to Ipswich, but with money still a problem, he and his family moved to Bath, where he matured as an artist, painting-and socializing with-fashionable society. When he returned to London in 1774, his career as a courtier-artist in the tradition of William Hogarth was cemented. His work, Titian-like in its scrum of brushwork, was notable for its technical virtuosity, somehow resolving from mottled skeins of color close up into precise, naturalist shapes and hues at a distance. Over the years, as this catalogue attests by its mere existence, he has remained a bedrock of British realism, his excellent society portraits (particularly his women in shiny dresses) and park-like forest scenes still beguiling to the modern eye. Less successful are his images of peasant life, however, which betray a deep unfamiliarity with those outside his social caste, and often compensate by blending them into the landscape as a kind of fleshy rock or tree. The accompanying text, although printed too small and thin, provides ample if somewhat dry information on the artist and his oeuvre, with close readings of his wide-ranging pictures and social life. This handsome, well-illustrated catalogue will maintain Gainsborough's reputation admirably well until his next revival rolls around. 254 illustrations, 195 plates in color.