The Critical Response to Thomas Gainsborough's Painting: A Study of the Contemporary Perception and Materiality of Gainsborough's Art

During his lifetime, Thomas Gainsborough's art was the subject of a substantial amount of criticism. The primary focus of this dissertation is on the most puzzling and least understood aspect of the contemporary critical response: the newspaper criticism of the 1770s and 1780s. The purpose of this study of the newspaper criticism is to understand the highly complex strategies employed by critics both to attack and to defend Gainsborough's art. The introduction contains a discussion of the general state of art criticism during the 1770s and 1780s. Each of the following chapters explores a major theme in the contemporary critical reception of Gainsborough's art. Chapter one, which is subdivided into three sections, treats the role of various Old Master references in the discussion of Gainsborough's portraits, landscapes, and fancy-pictures. Section one examines references to Van Dyck in the discussion of Gainsborough's portrait painting practices; section two examines references to Claude, Rubens, and then later, Ruysdael and Watteau, in the newspaper criticism of Gainsborough's landscapes; and section three examines references to Murillo in contemporary remarks about Gainsborough's fancy-pictures. Chapter two treats the role of music in the contemporary promotion of Gainsborough's painting as well as Gainsborough's role in the promotion of contemporary musicians. Chapter three deals with the introduction of picturesque ideas into the discussion of Gainsborough's "sketchy" technique. The subject of chapter four is the role of the newspapers in reporting Gainsborough's political activities, particularly with regard to his withdrawal from the Royal Academy in 1784. And finally, chapter five re-examines the most influential piece of Gainsborough criticism ever written and what is arguably a response to contemporary newspaper criticism: Sir Joshua Reynolds's Fourteenth Discourse. The principal conclusion of this study is that Gainsborough's critics made pioneering use of newspapers in a bid to influence the public perception of Gainsborough's art. Even though the various efforts to promote different aspects of Gainsborough's painting proved ultimately to be unsuccessful, the critical discourse that developed around Gainsborough's painting during the 1770s and 1780s set the stage for the increasingly important role of newspaper art criticism during the nineteenth century.