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"Mr. and Mrs. Andrews" by Thomas Gainsborough.
Painted c. 1748-1750
69.8 x 119.4 cm
The National Gallery, London
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Remarks from Stephen Butler's Gainsborough
(London: Studio Editions, 1992), 54: |
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| It was in this picture, one of the most
famous images of eighteenth-century Britain, that Gainsborough first demonstrated that
he was capable of quite breathtaking originality. Painted as a wedding portrait, it
approaches its subject in a strikingly innovative way, placing the couple well to one side of
the image and setting them in an apparently topographical landscape (while it was
accepted practice to centre the subjects in a decorative Arcadian scene). Gainsborough
reversed the design in Heneage Lloyd and his Sister, but never again used it as
boldly in a marriage portrait--although even his more conventional marriage portraits,
such as The Morning Walk,still depart significantly from the norm.
The use of dolls to model the poses of the couple is once again apparent, and although Mr. Andrew's clothing is carefully described, the lack of attention to the structure of the body beneath is plainly evident. The pose of his wife copies that of his fiancee, Margaret Burr, in Gainsborough's' own wedding picture. Despite their naivety, the figures are full of character and entirely believable--as Gainsborough's friend Philip Thicknesse remarked, they are "perfectly like but stiffly painted". |
Placing the couple in naturalistic
countryside, and allowing the scenery to marginalize them to such a degree was a daring
stroke, and eminently successful in conveying a sense of their ease within their inherited
rural domain. Though the picture is clearly unfinished--Mrs. Andrew's dress shows none
of the detail of Margaret's in the earlier work, and she was to have had a pheasant in her
lap, and there are some distinct irregularities of space and persective--the freshness
and immediacy of the image and its lack of pretentiousness have ensured its continuing
popularity and a central place in our perception of eighteenth-century Britain.
There has been some debate as to whether the landscape depicted is a real one--the Andrew's home was at Bulmer in Suffolk. Although the evidence is inconclusive, it seems likely that having determined to set his clients in realistic rather than mythological countryside, Gainsborough would indeed have chosen to show them in front of their own property. |
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