Famous art doesn’t always mean it’s worth a damn

Not all Old Master paintings are worthy of attention. Here's one artist telling you that in both his words and pictures. Consider the current Thomas Gainsborough show at No.1 Royal Crescent, a history museum in Somerset, England.

On view are recently acquired portraits of well-known society women by an artist long-celebrated for his portrait painting. How seriously should we take such work when neither the artist’s heart nor mind is in it, and when he painted portraits solely to make money.

Mark Bill, director of the Gainsborough House told the Guardian that motivating the portraits was a memory he couldn’t shake of his family going bankrupt, and he was driven to avoid that happening to him: “I think people who have been really poor never lose that concern about money.”

But wait, Gainsborough had a more immediate reason for making portraits he didn’t like making. In a letter to his friend William Jackson on June 4, 1768, he wrote that it was his daughters' needs that motivated him to be a portraitist:

“These fine ladies (his daughters) and their tea-drinkings, husband-hunting, etc., etc., etc., will job me out of the last ten years...But we can say nothing to these things you know Jackson, we must jog on and be content.”

That said, Gainsborough added, “I’m sick of portraits and wish very much to walk off to some sweet village, where I can paint landscapes.”

You can see evidence of this desire even in some of his portraits. “Mr. and Mrs. Andrews” pictures newlyweds sitting in the open air of their farm overlooking a cornfield. You can also see the Great Outdoors in his “Painter’s Daughters with Cat” with grainy brushwork that suggests earthiness.

So here is this artist celebrated in 18th-century England for his portrait that he hated painting, not to mention having to deal with demanding patrons.

ArtNet News cites a letter dated March 13, 1758 from Gainsborough, to “Mr. Edgar of Colchester.” an attorney for a family that commissioned portraits, calling their complaint that his work showed “roughness of surface” ridiculous.

Gainsborough told the attorney that the texture adds life to the painting. “I don't think it would be more ridiculous for a person to put his nose close to the canvas and say the colors smell offensive than to say how rough the paint lies.”

Patrons’ complaints aside, Gainsborough didn't like catering to those seeking to puff themselves up.

Art historian Edward Lucie-Smith noted in a 1992 anthology of artists’ anecdotes that when a certain lord came to be painted all dolled up in a powdered wig and wearing a self-important expression on his face, Gainsborough laughed and refused to paint him.

He did this with other lords, too, saying, “They have everybody's faces but their own.”

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