nalytical gifts to an obituary of Gainsborough, but when he stated that the portraits of Reynolds “remind the spectator of the invention of history, and the amenity of landscape”, he hit upon two phrases which serve conveniently to distinguish between the two, for it was Reynolds who preeminently related portraiture to history, while Gainsborough did so to landscape. No painter of the century before Turner was more precocious. At the age of 21 he was so much admired as a landscape painter that he received a high professional honour. He was one of the artists chosen to present a picture of a London hospital for the series decorating the Court Room of the Foundling Hospital. His subject was “The Charterhouse” and he handled it better than any of his seniors: Samuel Wale, Edward Haytley or Richard Wilson. There can be little doubt that he learned the secrets of Dutch painting by copying and restoring originals. The list of Dutch painters with whom writers on Gainsborough have detected resemblances includes Ruisdael, Hobbema, Du Jardin, Van der Heyden, Berchem, Cuyp, Paul Potter and Teniers. In the majority of cases references are to some correspondence of handling or technical effect, although the compositional resemblances are also numerous. All Gainsborough’s landscapes including the earliest that are known, showed that he owed as much to the observation of nature as he did to the imitation of art. From Hayman the scene painter and from Gravelot the rococo decorator he learned how to approach pictorial composition on altogether different principles from those of the Dutch. There is a doll-like quality in some of his small full-length portraits which recalls the practice of Gravelot in using dressed-up dolls for his drawing lessons. during this formative period he also modelled figures of “cows, horses and dogs”. Stage scenery, artificial lighting, models and mock-ups were hencefor...
