Of Gainsborough's personality and character much has no doubt been gathered from the preceding pages. His physical appearance is familiar from his own portraits of himself, and from that which Zoffany painted of him. He was handsome, tall and strong, with large features and a broad if not very high forehead; the small eyes are quick and observant, the mouth sensitive and rather undecided. In the choice of his friends he attached little importance to breeding and none to social position; he was generous and open-handed to all, with money to his relations and often indiscriminately with his works to friends or mere acquaintances: on one occasion he gave his picture of the "Boy at the Stile" to Colonel Hamilton (equally well known at the time as an amateur violinist and a gentleman pugilist) for having played him a solo on the violin; to Wiltshire, the carrier who took his pictures from Bath to London, and who refused to take payment in money from the artist, he presented many valuable landscapes.
Intellectually he was extremely gifted; although his education in his youth was much neglected his letters show him to have been by no means ignorant or uncultivated. They also bear the impress of his spontaneous wit and keen humour; of this quality there is evidence in numerous anecdotes. An old man of the labouring class, named Fowler, used to sit to him at Bath; on the studio mantelpiece stood a child's skull, the gift of a medical friend.
"Fowler, without moving his position, continually peered at it askance, with inquisitive eye. 'Ah! Master Fowler,' said the painter, 'that is a mighty curiosity.' 'What might it be, sir, if I may make so bold?' 'A whale's eye,' was the grave reply. 'No, no, never say so, Muster Gainsborough. Sir, it is a little child's skull!' 'You have hit it,' said the wag. 'Why, Fowler, you're a witch! But what will you say when I tell you it is the skull of Julius Cæsar when he was a little boy!' 'Laws!' cried Fowler, 'what a phenomenon!'"
Gainsborough's temper was very hasty, quite opposed to the patient courtliness of Reynolds. When a certain peer or alderman, posing, with boundless self-satisfaction, for his portrait, begged the artist not to overlook the dimple in his chin, "Damn the dimple in your chin, I will paint neither the one nor the other!" was the uncompromising rejoinder.
These stories, unimportant as they are, serve to give an insight into the man's character; but whatever his personal faults and qualities may or may not have been it is with his works that posterity is chiefly concerned, and by them and them alone that Gainsborough must be judged.
[IV]
GAINSBOROUGH'S WORKS
The works of Gainsborough may be divided into three chronological groups, just as his life was divided between three distinct localities. But whereas there is a definite and fundamental difference between the pictures painted at Ipswich and those of the remainder of his life, there is not to any similar extent a determined demarkation between his productions at Bath and those of his last and most glorious years in London.
It has been seen that Gainsborough used palette and brush from at least the age of fourteen, when he went to London to study with Hayman. But the productions of this very early period are extremely difficult to identify. The National Gallery of Ireland possesses two drawings in pencil, portraits of a man and a woman, on each of which appears the signature Tho: Gainsborough fecit 1743-1744. These, the earliest extant attempts of Gainsborough in portraiture are hard and laboured in execution, but the heads are well-modelled and full of character; they must have been done in London before his return to his native Sudbury.
A similar hardness and elaborate care and attention to detail characterises the early landscapes painted in Suffolk. The only pictures of the old masters to which the young artist could have had access at this period were landscapes of Dutch painters such as Ruysdael, Hobbema, and Wynants. Their influence is obvious in his own early productions, especially that of Wynants; the most important work of this character is the large landscape belonging to Mr. J. D. Cobbold of Ipswich; it is an elaborate composition, semi-classical in style, with conventional hills in the distance, and a carefully put in group of cattle and figures in the foreground. This is the sort of thing that Thicknesse must have found in the painter's studio upon his first visit, together with the portrait of Admiral Vernon (now in the National Portrait Gallery), and others which the Governor describes as "truly drawn, perfectly like, but stiffly painted and worse coloured."