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THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH
Portrait of the Artist's Wife{c. 1778)
Oil on lined canvas, 77cm X 64.5cm/ 30 1/4in X 25 1/4 in

Gainsborough was apprenticed around 1740 to a French engraver, and this training is reflected in his style. His main introduction to painting came through the copying and restoration of seventeenth century Dutch paintings. Besides being a prolific artist, he became a founder member of the Royal Academy in London in 1768.

Unlike Reynolds, Gainsborough confined his experiments with technique largely to paper. The majority of his easel paintings, however. testify to the wisdom of painting 'fat over lean' and to this day. many of the portraits done in his later years remain in sound condition and are almost free of craquelure and surface deterioration.

Our knowledge of the artist's materials is scant and unreliable, but his letters indicate a fastidiousness in the choice of pigments and varnishes. Gainsborough normally favored varieties of a warm, red-brown color for a ground described in contemporary texts as resembling 'tanned leather' and particularly recommended for landscapes.

Contemporaries of Gainsborough describe how he would begin work in a very subdued light, 'a kind of darkened twilight', which enabled him to assess his subject in terms of basic shapes and broad tonal areas, free from distracting detail. Probably over a preliminary cursory chalk drawing, he would set to work on the canvas with rapid strokes of black, umber, lake or white paint, followed by washes of thinned color to 'block out' the form. These transparent washes, often so thin that they resembled watercolor, were to serve as a tonal underlay for further development.

The thin underlayers and half tones would begin to dry quickly, enabling Gainsborough to apply translucent, opaque, and glazing colors very rapidly in a largely wet-in-wet technique, either working into the washes or over them with translucent layers.

The drapery and background would be com-pleted last by the artist applying color in a welter of glazes and loose, dazzling, scumbled strokes - 'odd scratches and marks' - which, as
Reynolds observed, only assumed form when viewed from a distance. Very often alterations can be seen with the naked eye, and X-rays re-veal that changes were often undertaken when the painting was close to completion.

Gainsborough would first work from the model in a dim light allowing him to lay in the general tones of the larger areas, working quickly in rough washes of very thin oil which served as an under-painting for the subsequent development of flesh and drapery. Allowing more light on the subject, he would complete the head of the model. In this case, the eyes, nose and mouth appear to have been put in using a wet-in-wet technique, while the overall smoothness of the surface suggests the artist may have used a blender before applying the last touches as seen in the highlights in the eye, the strokes of red-brown in the curve of the eyelid, the line of the mouth and the dabs of color for the nostrils.

Gainsborough's use of a pale ground in this picture perhaps relates to his interest in transparencies lit from behind. As well as constructing an illuminated box, he and other artists painted some larger-than-life figures for a theater in 1775 and one contemporary noted that 'these pictures arc all transparent and are lighted behind'.

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