 This lecture is entitled Thomas Gainesboro, Landscape plus Portrait Equals Artistic Success. Now, Thomas Gainesboro, who you see in this self-portrait on the right, which dates to 1759, was actually trained as a landscape painter in that distinct genre of landscape painting. But as you may recall, the primary and most popular genre of painting in England was portrait painting. So what Gainesboro did was take his training and combine that with the demand for portrait painting, these two distinct genres to come up with a new kind of portrait painting, that was equal parts landscape and portrait. And that might not seem all that innovative to us because we've seen this kind of thing before, but in 18th century England, this was still a pretty new approach to portraiture. And Gainesboro was really, really successful at this and people really liked his portrait. So he got a lot of commissions and it was really a winning combination. I think you can see, kind of get a preview of this when we just look at this pretty simple, straightforward self-portrait of Gainesboro. We have Gainesboro in the center looking out at us and there is not necessarily a distinct landscape, but a suggestion of some landscape behind him. And I think you can see there's this foliage that kind of acts as a frame around his head. And there's also an interesting relationship between the sitter himself and the landscape details. And we'll see how Gainesboro makes use of that relationship between sitter and natural background as we take a look at a couple of his most famous works of art. So let's move on now and look at one of those. Okay, so here on the left, this large portrait slash landscape, we have Mr. and Mrs. Andrews. And this dates to around 1750. And over here on the right, we have something that's very familiar to us by now. It's Fragonard's The Swing and we'll talk about that in just a minute, but for now you can kind of put that out of your mind. So let's focus on Mr. and Mrs. Andrews. Well, this was one of Gainesboro's early commissions and it shows this married couple and their dog and they're actually fairly newly married in this portrait and they are sitting on their estate. And hopefully one of the first things you notice when you saw this painting was most of the canvas is devoted to landscape. This is a really big canvas and the portraits of the couple themselves just kind of sits off on the side. So like I said, it's kind of one part landscape, one part portrait and it's a really interesting combination of the two. Now, the portrait of the married couple is pretty straightforward. It's nothing over the top. It's a fairly restrained, modest depiction of these two people. They don't seem to be ostentatious. Their dress is not over the top and certainly the way in which they're depicted is not flamboyant or over the top and that's part of why I included Fragonard's swing over here because that is certainly an example of an over the top portrayal of a couple. We have, and it's similar to Mr. and Mrs. Andrews in some ways, it's a couple in a natural landscape but I think you can see the way Fragonard took that and made it really sumptuous and erotic and over the top at how very different Gainsborough's depiction of Mr. and Mrs. Andrews is from that. But not only is the tone of the painting and the depiction of the people different but also the details of this setting are different. We have this kind of fantasy world in Fragonard's painting whereas as I mentioned, this landscape by Gainsborough is actually the estate of Mr. and Mrs. Andrews and that actually might bring to mind something else we've looked at earlier in this course so let's take a look now. So here again is Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, a little bit smaller and on the right is, hopefully this is familiar to you, Jacob Van Roystahl's view of Harlem and I wanted to show you these two images together because they're both really portraits of an actual place, landscapes of real places. Both of these depict real identifiable places. These are not fantasy depictions of some idealized natural state. So that's an interesting thing to keep in mind and I also wanted to include this comparison simply because during the Baroque when Roystahl painted this image on the right, the English loved Dutch and Flemish painting, they patronized this kind of art. So this is the sort of thing that would have been in the English artistic tradition. So it's not surprising that we see some stylistic similarities, the clouds, the pretty clear distinct lines, so on and so forth but really I just wanted to show you this comparison for the sake of the landscape and of course we have the portraits inserted in here too. Now let's move on and take a look at another famous portrait by Gainsborough and it's really just a lovely, sumptuous, beautiful portrait and this is it here on the left and this is Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan and this dates quite a bit later. It dates to 1787 and this here, we'll take a look at it in a minute again, this is just for the sake of comparison so for now let's just focus on Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan herself. So I think you can see that by later in his career Gainsborough had a bit more of a luxurious approach to portraits in a landscape setting and his style I think you can see kind of embraces some of those Rococo elements that really soft quality, the light brush stroke, the sumptuous approach to natural details but importantly we still have maintained that kind of serious, modest tone that was very crucial to British portraiture so we have this modest English woman in this very beautiful and sumptuous landscape so it's an interesting combination of things going on and it's interesting to use sort of incorrect terminology it's kind of a wonderful combination of portrait-iness right here in the center with landscapiness and landscapiness kind of borrowed from the Rococo and what I think is really interesting about this portrait is that the background elements of the landscape seem to kind of fuse together with the woman, the sitter in the foreground notice for example her hair kind of blowing out is just like the foliage in the tree above her you know it says though the tree could be her hair or her hair could be the tree same thing going on with this sort of translucent shawl around her shoulders blending in with the clouds in the background so a really interesting approach to a sitter in nature and the kind of symbiotic relationship of these two figures so Gainsborough really did some amazingly innovative stuff with his portraits and I think this is really a wonderful example of what he was able to achieve