12. The Griffier Family of Painters and the Young Thomas Gainsborough
Rica Jones
For many years this author has been examining and researching the work that Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) produced in the 1740s and 1750s, the years he spent in London and Suffolk before his move to the city of Bath in 1758/9.1 Although new biographical evidence emerged in the 20th century about his early life and art, these years remain the least well documented of his career, especially regarding his training as a painter. We know that in his very first years in London he worked with Hubert François Gravelot (1699–1773) and Francis Hayman (1708–1776). As early as the mid-19th century, however, it was postulated that there must have been another influence at work, but that idea has been ignored in later studies. Gainsborough’s first proper biographer, George Williams Fulcher (1795–1855), observed that, ‘Whatever knowledge he acquired of his art, beyond its elements, was gained from other instructors than Hayman, and elsewhere than in the Academy in St. Martin’s Lane’.2 Working on the premise that artists’ early use of paint must reflect their initial training (even though they may depart from those practices as the years pass), this author has compared the materials in Gainsborough’s early paint with those of his contemporaries in London to see what clues might emerge.3 Painters whose work has been analysed in this context are as follows: Joseph Highmore (1692–1780), William Hogarth (1697–1764), Gravelot, George Lambert (1700–1765), Thomas Hudson (1701–1779), Samuel Scott (1702–1772), Francis Hayman, Petrus van Reysschoot (1702–1772), Allan Ramsay (1713–1784), Richard Wilson (1713–1782), Samuel Wale (1721–1786), Sir Joshua Reynolds (1724–1792), Edward Haytley (fl. 1740–1764).
When analysed for its component parts, Gainsborough’s paint from the 1740s and early 1750s is different in several ways from that of his British contemporaries. As we will see, it has technical features that are close to Dutch and Flemish painting, and this paper investigates where and how the young artist might have learnt them. As he is not recorded as having left Britain in his youth, he must instead have had close contact with London-based artists who had a European continental background and who travelled to and from the continent. It postulates that Jan Griffier the Younger (1673–1750) or perhaps Robert Griffier (1678–1743), both sons of Jan Griffier the Elder (1652–1718), played some part in Gainsborough’s early development as a painter. In the course of this research much new information about the Griffier family came to light – for example that there were three painters in that family called Jan/John Griffier, not two as we had thought; and also three painters called Robert Griffier (father, son and grandson), not one as we had thought. Their complex lives will be covered in a forthcoming paper.
Cover image
Thomas Gainsborough
Reverend John Chafy (1719-1782) playing the violoncello in a landscape, c. 1750-1752
London (England), Tate Gallery, inv./cat.nr. T03895
Notes
1 Jones 1997; Jones 1999; Jones/Postle 2002; contributions in Bills/Jones 2018: ‘The making of Gainsborough’s early landscapes’; ‘Two fragment portraits by Thomas Gainsborough’; ‘An assessment of two small pastoral landscapes’.
2 Fulcher 1856, p. 29. Fulcher was a Sudbury poet and bookseller, who had spent many years collecting information about Gainsborough. He died before he could publish the book, which task was undertaken by his son.
3 An example is Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose paintings from the late 1740s display all the technical features of his master, Thomas Hudson. By the time Reynolds returned from Italy in 1753, he had discarded most of those methods and materials.