Why did Thomas Gainsborough paint his family so often? | 'The Painter's Daughters with a Cat'

It sounds obvious, but Gainsborough thought a portrait should actually look like the person that's being painted. You know you're looking at real human beings rather than idolised human beings. Hello everyone, I'm Christine Riding, I'm Director of Collections and Research here at the National Gallery but I'm also Curator of British Paintings and today I'm focusing on one of the most important artists of the 18th century, Thomas Gainsborough, in particular this work of art of his daughters Mary and Margaret, the painter's daughters with a cat, painted in about 1760, an absolute pivotal moment when he's really launching himself into the British art world. Thomas Gainsborough was born in 1727 in Sudbury in Suffolk and he initially makes his reputation as an artist in Ipswich and the surrounding area. He then moves to London as a very young person and works in the circle of William Hogarth and particularly from him he learns how to represent children. When he goes back to Ipswich he starts developing portraiture around the very fashionable conversation pieces, very much intimate private portraiture and we have some wonderful examples in the collection. A very early portrait of himself, his wife Margaret and their first daughter Mary who unfortunately dies at the age of 18 months and hence Mary in the portraits of his surviving children is named after the first daughter. We also have a very celebrated almost iconic conversation piece of Mr and Mrs Andrews and this is local Essex landowners in their country estate looking very grand, looking very relaxed. These portraits of friends and family are not just sentimental representations of people that Gainsborough knows intimately, this is how he's utilising the people around him to really push the boundaries of what he's doing as an artist. So what these paintings here are doing is showing you how Gainsborough is thinking through moving from Ipswich to London then on to Bath how he's going to develop this career as a pre-eminent society portrait painter. Gainsborough painted at least six double portraits of his daughters Mary and Margaret. We have two in the National Gallery collection, the first was this one over here, the daughters chasing a butterfly and then we have the painter's daughters with a cat which shows the daughters about two years older. You can see the change in the faces of the children that they have actually got a little bit older but nonetheless the devotion that they feel for each other is absolutely clear. We have Mary on the right hand side, the eldest, who sort of takes control of the composition by really being the older sister who's looking after her younger sister Margaret. So Margaret leans on her sister I suppose in a metaphorical sense as well as in the portrait itself. This is unfinished, you've got a base colour of a sort of warm pinkish brown, he's very very sketchy and very rapid brushstrokes, showing the clouds, showing the trees but very very sketchily. Their figures are also very sketchily handled. Originally he clearly wanted the children to be holding a cat because you can see this sort of face of the cat kind of grinning through. A little bit terrified, I don't know if Mary was meant to be pulling his tail or something but anyway he doesn't look a happy cat. What's very sweet about the painting is this very beautifully observed way of painting the features of the daughters. I mean obviously he knows them extremely well, that sense of intimacy and knowledge of the children absolutely grins through here. You can't help but think of this as a loving portrayal of two daughters but also an exercise in how Gainsborough can really show individuality, individual features. What he's trying to advertise in himself is the ability to capture a likeness. His great rival Reynolds was renowned for creating great art but not necessarily portraits that look like the person who's in the painting. But Gainsborough thought this was ridiculous, a portrait's got to look like somebody. This is a very intimate pose, the reason why it is so popular with visitors to the National Gallery is because they can see in it the kind of images that they themselves are taking, whether on camera or sketching, of their own children. So it's a connection I think between an artist of the 18th century and people now in the 21st century. So I think the intimacy of it is something that people really respond to. So this is about the intimacy and innocence of childhood and the brevity of childhood seems to be the theme of this particular painting. The daughter's chasing a butterfly. It's just so extraordinary for the 18th century to see a painting like this of children not sort of posed and positioned rather stiffly or even sort of slightly informally but showing his children literally moving across the canvas, reaching out as Margaret is doing towards a butterfly on a thistle which is clearly meant to represent danger and brevity. A butterfly lasts for what, a couple of days, two weeks maximum, the brevity of life and also the dangers of life because if Margaret grabs that butterfly will she also hurt herself on the thistle and her elder sister, so Mary's about two years older, is kind of showing her maturity almost by holding her back to sort of prevent her from hurting herself and this I think, as indeed in this painting, is what Gainsborough really observed in the art of William Hogarth. With these portraits he's exploring different genres of art that are fashionable at the time and therefore likely to gain commissions but also nod towards a longer old master tradition and this is a transformational moment for him and his art. He establishes himself as a portrait painter moving into these bigger, grander, half-length, full-length portraits but to get there he needs to show the clientele in Ipswich in London and Bath where he moves in 1759 that he can rival the great portraits of Anthony van Dyck. Anthony van Dyck's influence over British art is profound. To make your name in society portrait painter in the 1750s, 60s and 70s you have to engage with Anthony van Dyck and Gainsborough of all artists in Britain in the 18th century is the artist who modelled himself most as a kind of latter-day van Dyck figure both in terms of the scale and prestige and glamour of his portraits but also particularly the technique and that was a master class in bravura brushwork which we see again and again in what Gainsborough is trying to achieve. So in 1760 about that point there's a tipping point when he really emerges as the heir as it were to Anthony van Dyck. This painting on the left hand side is of his nephew Edward Gardner. It's painted in the late 60s, 70s and the eagle-eyed amongst you will have noted him wearing blue van Dyck dress. Now this is a studio prop in the studio of Gainsborough. It appears in numerous paintings including the very famous full-length The Blue Boy which was exhibited in 1770 at the Royal Academy. So these kind of sketches is him trying this out. How do you utilise the very fashionable use of van Dyck dress and the very fashionable technique of van Dyck through portraiture, through child portraiture in particular? But as here, as elsewhere in these paintings, the real focus for Gainsborough is the face. Here we have him looking much more at more formal portraiture. This one here of Margaret playing with the oboe. The Gainsborough family were very good at music, you know, very talented musicians and surrounded themselves actually with musicians. That was very much their social circle. You could see this image of his daughter as almost her talents, her status, her marriageability potentially through the playing of music which was deemed to be a talent that women were meant to possess. Very sketchily handled down here, much more focus on the face. She is wearing very fashionable dress, very cutting edge for the 1770s with this very high powdered hair which was quite formal, much more about high social occasions rather than what you'd expect to see a sort of sitting in the Gainsborough house playing music. So it is a more elevated image. So these kind of works of art could have been exhibited in Schomburg House down Pall Mall which is the London home of the Gainsboroughs in order to advertise what the father Thomas Gainsborough could do. And I think that's even clearer with this work of art over here of Mary the eldest. A more finished work of art but even so very sketchily handled in the manner of Van Dyck. The brush strokes in this are absolutely exquisite showing his absolute mastery of oil on canvas. He's looking at but another great artist of the 17th century, again very fashionable in the 18th century, which is Peter Paul Rubens. The ultimate aim of these kind of sketches, because most of them are really sketches rather than finished oils, is really the portrait of Mrs Siddons, the greatest actor of her age, exhibited in 1785 in contemporary dress but she looks like she's from the 17th century. She looks like a Van Dyck figure. The whole pose, the whole manner of the way she's painted, a contemporary woman but absolutely steeped in the history of the 17th century. And that is really what these paintings are trying to achieve for Gainsborough, is that kind of work of art. The whole redisplay of the National Gallery's 66 galleries on the main floor of a thousand works of art which forms part of our new displays called CC Land Wonder of Art is to show how artists have been inspired by artists. We all firmly believe that great art isn't born out of slavishly copying the art of the past but rather being inspired by it to further your own art in your own time, and this is really what Thomas Gainsborough is doing here. He's showing how you can use the old masters but in a thoroughly contemporary way. If you want to learn more about art click here or here and subscribe to our channel. Thank you for watching and see you soon.