Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Thomas Gainsborough
British (English); 18th-century
London, England: Kenwood House
82%
Greyhounds Coursing a Fox. 1785. Oil on canvas
A gallery attendant told me that this is a memento mori. The cancer that killed Gainsborough was in the back of his neck, right where the dog in this picture is biting the fox. Seems plausible, and if it's true — crazy. Crazy because this painting is so goddamn painterly. Typically, the problem with Gainsborough is that he doesn't let his hair down enough; he seems only ever to allow himself to Capital-P Paint within strict, decorous limits. But this piece, his personal death knell (it hung in his studio), explodes at the upper right inside of those trees. It has paint, too, gobbing up in the clouds; there's no logic besides that of raw tone and mass to the way the hills recede at left; the hounds (Gainsborough's cancer) are like emblems of brush strokes gliding across the canvas. But then so is the fox, which is just as lissome as the dogs, and more richly hued: painting is life, painting's also life's end. (Legend has it that Gainsborough's last two words were, "Van Dyck.") That said, this picture isn't worth celebrating wholesale. What Gainsborough's gained in expressive freedom, he's lost in brawn. The action takes place rather equivocally within the landscape; it's too lateral and leaves too much of what's behind it to chance. This is among Gainsborough's best paintings, but it puts his weaknesses on display. (TFS, 2025)
St. Louis, MO: Saint Louis Art Museum
67%
View in Suffolk. c1755. Oil on canvas
Gainsborough's best when you can really see his brush at work. (His landscape compositions are too much like softened Claude to hold your interest in themselves.) You get a bit of his hand here where the riverbank cuts in to the left and then arcs out to face the front of the picture: those ochres in puddles and dabbling browns. The foliage at bottom right, too, is a small dark marvel of handling and tones. But though the scene hangs together perfectly well with its firm, unobtrusive arrangement (as English pictures tend to do), it fails to accomplish anything more than just hang together (as English pictures also tend to do). The bend of the river and the curve of the road lock into each low down the canvas and diverge towards the edges of the frame, where they're each held into the scene by a tree. Above this is a clean and too curtly delimiting horizon line, and above that are clouds floating atop a flat blue sky that grades slightly from light to dark. It's all so proper and clean — which if this were a modern painting would mean it's all so kitschy. (But it's not a modern painting.) (TFS, 2025)
New York, NY: Metropolitan Museum of Art
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Mrs. Grace Dalrymple Elliot. 1778. Oil on canvas
... (TFS, 2025)