RKD STUDIES

Although it is reasonable to assume that the general biographical information in the obituaries came from the artist himself, Gainsborough is not recorded directly as having mentioned by name the people involved in his training as a painter. As we know, however, that he was introduced to Gravelot and Hayman, what might they have taught him about the craft of painting? A few oil paintings by Gravelot exist, but all the documentary and stylistic evidence indicates that he taught Gainsborough only drawing and design, and this is borne out by close examination of Gravelot’s paint.

Figures [3] and [5] illustrate two tiny fragments of paint and its underlying ground photographed at very high magnification. Figure [3] is from green paint in Gainsborough’s Rev. John Chafy Playing the Violoncello in a Landscape [4], and figure [5] is from blue paint at the edge of the chair back in Gravelot’s Le Lecteur [6]. Gainsborough’s green is made up of many differently coloured pigments whereas Gravelot’s blue is a homogeneous mix of the two principal pigments, Prussian blue and white. These differing systems of producing colour prevail in their respective works. Gainsborough’s pigment mixtures are complex and usually semi-translucent, Gravelot’s are simpler and usually opaque.¹

Turning to Hayman, a fragment of green paint [7] from his Wrestling Scene from ‘As You Like It’ [8] is closer to Gainsborough’s but with certain differences. They are similar in that when viewed at higher magnification than in these illustrations, both the Gainsborough and Hayman samples can be seen to contain a complex range of pigments. These complex mixtures were characteristic of British artists’ paint in this period; rather than use a traditional method of applying an opaque colour that could be glazed over when dry with translucent paint to enrich or modify it, they often mixed opaque and translucent pigments together in one application.² Despite that similarity, however, Hayman’s paint, together with that of their British contemporaries, differs from Gainsborough’s in that individual pigments are largely obscured by the amount of opaque lead white in the mixture; only a few particles are large enough to remain visible in the matrix. In the Gainsborough sample, by contrast, the pigment particles are able to exert their full complement of functions – their colour, their texture, whether they are large or small, translucent or opaque, dull or sparkly. Gainsborough is very unusual amongst his British contemporaries in being so appreciative of all these aspects of a pigment.

5
A fragment of blue paint from Gravelot’s Le Lecteur, photographed through the microscope at x125 magnification. Photographed at the National Gallery, London, by Dr Ashok Roy. The white layer beneath the blue paint is the ground of the painting, and the yellow layer above it is the varnish

6
Hubert François Gravelot
Le Lecteur or The Judicious lover
Twickenham (England), Marble Hill House, inv./cat.nr. 88029317

Instead of mixing large amounts of lead white into his paint, as Hayman and others did, Gainsborough introduced significant amounts of ground glass, which allows light to penetrate the paint film. In some instances this glass is the pigment smalt, which is blue glass ground down to a powder; the different grades of blue smalt range from a deep royal blue to very nearly water white; all are translucent. There were several reasons for using glass or smalt in oil paint, apart from the colouring function of blue smalt: they gave bulk to the paint without rendering it opaque; containing the minerals lead or cobalt, they helped the oil dry quickly; they could be used by colourmen as a cheap ‘invisible’ extender. ³ Since we know that Gainsborough was sometimes hard up in his early years, might this mean simply that he bought cheap paint? We do not know if Gainsborough prepared his own materials or bought all or some of them ready prepared from a colourman. By the 1740s London artists could, if they chose, buy everything they needed ready prepared from at least one colourman. Mr Keating kept a shop on Long Acre (round the corner from the St Martin’s Lane Academy) and furnished the painter ‘with every Article he uses, such as Pencils, Brushes, Cloths ready for drawing on, and all Manner of Colours ready prepared’.⁴ It is probable that colourmen like Keating were mixing ground glass with their paint as a cheap extender. At very high magnification, small quantities of ground glass can be seen in many paintings by Gainsborough’s British contemporaries, including Hayman’s. In some of Gainsborough’s early paintings, however, the quantity of glass or pale smalt in all the colours is too large to have been anything but a deliberate choice, and this is shown to great effect in The Charterhouse of 1748 [9].⁵ Figure [10] shows a detail at high magnification of the brick wall at the lower left of the composition; the paint is translucent, containing not only red ochres, vermilion and red lakes mixed together to produce the overall brick red tone, but also a large proportion of smalt to render it bright and translucent.⁶ The translucency allows the brick red colour to be enriched by the underlying orange-coloured ground, which can be seen at the extreme left of the illustration.⁷

9
Thomas Gainsborough
The Charterhouse, 1748
London (England), Coram in the care of The Foundling Museum, inv./cat.nr. FM21

10
Detail of the brick wall at the lower left edge of The Charterhouse, photographed at x10 magnification by Rica Jones

Another technical feature of Gainsborough’s paint in this period is the use of pigments that were much favoured in the 17th century but were unusual in the work of his British contemporaries. The principal of these is lead-tin yellow, which is present in several of Gainsborough’s works that appear to date from before 1748. They are Portrait of a man traditionally identiefied as Clayton Jones, c.1744–1745 [11];⁸ Mr and Mrs Carter, c.1747–1748 [12];⁹ Portrait of a Young Boy (fragment, c.1744) and Portrait of a Young Girl (fragment, c. 1744) [13-14];¹⁰ Open Landscape with a Country Waggon, c. 1746–47 [15];¹¹ Landscape with a Peasant on a Path (1746–1747) [16].¹²

Lead-tin yellow is a bright, opaque, pale yellow compound and its main use was as an opacifier in the glass and ceramic industries in Europe; as a by-product it was a useful yellow pigment for painters.¹³ Its use for painting can be traced back to medieval times,¹⁴ and it is found commonly in European paintings of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. By the 18th century, however, its use was declining in the ceramic and glass industries with attendant reduced supply of the material as a pigment for painting.¹⁵ Published results of scientific analysis state that lead-tin yellow has been found in a few paintings by continental artists from the first decades of the 18th century but not yet later than 1750.¹⁶ This author has not found it in the work of any 18th-century British-born artists other than Gainsborough, and is not aware of anyone else’s having found it either. Gainsborough’s Landscape with a Peasant on a Path also contains a range of other pigments that are seldom found in the work of his British contemporaries: verdigris, a copper green; dolomite, a pearly white mineral used as a pigment in the white clouds with lead white; bistre, a translucent brown used more in watercolour than oil painting; azurite, a blue copper-containing mineral used only rarely in the 18th century.¹⁷ Wooded Landscape with Reclining Shepherd, Scattered Sheep and Cottage (c. 1748) [17] contains copious amounts of the crystalline yellow mineral, orpiment, which catches the light on the surface of the light green areas [18].¹⁸

The use of glassy substances in paint has a long tradition in continental Europe; in Dutch and Flemish painting it goes back as far as Jan van Eyck (active 1422–died 1441) and earlier.¹⁹ Taking painters from the 17th century alone, Jan van Goyen (1596–1656) and Salomon van Ruysdael (1600/3–1670) used ground glass or pale smalt extensively in their ‘tonal’ landscapes, and smalt has been found as an admixture in a range of colours in the work of Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669) and Jan Wijnants (1632–1684).²⁰ An understanding of all the qualities of pigments, such as we have seen in Gainsborough’s paintings, was a product of the workshop tradition that still prevailed on the continent but which, as we have seen, was much diminished in Britain. All the unusual pigments that Gainsborough used would have been more readily available on the continent than in London; the author has found none of them in the work of British painters in the 1740s and early 1750s. In thinking about how Gainsborough might have acquired his knowledge and unusual materials, it is vital to bear in mind that the unaided eye cannot discern the presence of ground glass in a painting nor analyse the pigment mixtures. While we know that Gainsborough’s landscapes in this period derived much stylistically from 17th-century Dutch painters, especially Jacob van Ruisdael (1628/9–1682) and Jan Wijnants, he cannot have learned the minutiae of their technique simply by looking. Gainsborough must have been taught to mix his colours in this Netherlandish way. In searching for Netherlandish painters working in London in the 1740s and who travelled to and from the continent, the Griffier family fits the bill.

15
Thomas Gainsborough
Open landscape with a country waggon, c. 1746-1747
Sudbury (Suffolk), Gainsborough’s House

16
Thomas Gainsborough
Landscape with a Peasant on a Path, c. 1746-1747
Sudbury (Suffolk), Gainsborough’s House, no. L0056 (on long loan from the Tate Gallery, London, no. N01485)