The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art November 1971 [antikvár]

THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH George Pitt, First Lord Rivers Figure 1. George Pin. First Lord Rivers. Oil on canvas, 92-1/4 x 60-3/4 inches (234.32 x 154.3 cm.), painted late 1768 or 1769. Thomas Gainsborough, English, 1727-1788. Gift, The John Huntington Art and Polytechnic Trust. 71.2 If ever this nation should produce genius sufficient to acquire us the honourable distinction of an English School, the name of Gainsborough will be transmitted to posterity, in the history of the Art, among the very first of that rising name. —Reynolds, Discourse Fourteen, 1790 One can scarcely name a country or a period which called so often upon the portrait to represent both a people and their time as England in the eighteenth century. Lacking the tradition of court or ecclesiastical patronage for major allegorical or religious paintings—main elements in the development of Continental painting—English artists concentrated their efforts mainly on portraiture. The two greatest portrait painters of the mid-century were Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723-1792) and Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788). Though they were working at the same time in London for many years and were well known to each other, their portraits reveal two quite different artistic goals, both important to an understanding of English painting of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Reynolds was a theoretician and critic as well as a painter. He had made himself thoroughly familiar with the visual vocabulary and technical methods of the Old Masters and taught that the salvation of English painting lay in the knowledge and practice of their techniques.' He directed English painting toward the richness of Italian sixteenth- and seventeenth-century composition as well as toward its palette. He espoused history painting as the most worthy of all subjects, much as had the French academicians in the seventeenth century. He urged English artists to enrich and ennoble their own pictures by learning the secrets of the greatest art of the past, thereby linking their painting to the rich and diverse European tradition. Reynolds pointed English art away from a provincialism based on Dutch and Flemish portraiture and landscape toward loftier accomplishments in the realm of history painting. He himself, however, painted portraits and conversation pieces, bringing to