GALLERY 59: Thomas Gainsborough, Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, painted probably 1785/1786
With a feeling for theatricality, Gainsborough interplays the frail figure of a young woman and the powerful mood of nature to establish a perfect setting for this celebrated actress and wife of the playwright and politician Sheridan. Born Elizabeth Linley, she was Gainsborough’s lifelong friend. A motif common to the eighteenth century, the Age of Enlightenment, was the use of nature and an informal pose to achieve unaffected simplicity. In this portrait, however, early signs of romanticism are clearly seen in the dramatic quality of the blowing trees and windswept figure contrasted with the calm features of the finely modeled face. Gainsborough normally painted under candlelight to give a glow and flickering liveliness to his sitters and sometimes used six-foot-long brushes to avoid finicky detailing.
GALLERY 57: Joseph Mallord William Turner, Keelmen Heaving in Coals by Moonlight, painted probably in 1835
Turner’s exaggerated rendition of moonlight was criticized by conservatives when this night scene on the River Tyne was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1835. Cutting through the center of the painting, the arched curve of brilliant light transforms the reality of a gritty industrial scene into an appealingly romantic seascape and brings the world of man into accord with nature. Through the misty English air and against the thinly painted sky, the moon shimmers forth as a disk of thick white paint.
American Art
(Galleries 60, 60A, 60B, 62, and 64-68)
Established as a subculture of the mother country, the American colonies looked to England for leadership in the arts. Ambitious painters, finding no opportunity for formal training in the colonies, went to study in Europe. Benjamin West, a Pennsylvania Quaker, after three years in Italy, in 1763 established himself in London, where he achieved such renown that he became History Painter to King George III and was later appointed second president of the Royal Academy of Arts. Until after the Civil War, the best training was still abroad, but usually the American students returned to the United States, where a growing urban society with more leisure was providing a market for works of art.
During the first half of the nineteenth century, many untrained artists, working in the cities but more often traveling about the countryside, provided naïve or primitive pictures for the ever-increasing middle classes. Up to this time the artist had been mainly a portraitist; but with the invention of the camera in 1839 he had to shift his emphasis, and by mid-century America had a thriving school of landscape painters, whose works fed a national pride in the great wild terrain of the New World. After the Civil War, however, these landscapes also appealed to a populace seeking relief in the ideal world of a quiet countryside away from the humdrum of dirty cities that were springing up everywhere, the result of the Industrial Revolution.
Thomas Eakins and Winslow Homer were the great turn-of-the-century artists. They portrayed American life and scenery with straightforward candor. Their example has been carried on by some modern American artists who, fascinated with the urban growth of the 1900s, have emphasized the vitality of city life. These include painters such as Henri, Bellows, and Sloan. More recently abstract art has been in the forefront of American painting.