Thomas Gainsborough, Artist Trivia Quiz

Answer: the eighteenth

The eighteenth century, although often described as "the golden age of English portrait painting", produced several men of genius - William Hogarth and Joseph Wright of Derby, to name but two - who could not restrict themselves to such a narrow remit as portraiture just because it was so lucrative. Gainsborough deserves to be considered alongside these great artists, in that (although, like Hogarth and Wright, he produced many wonderful and supremely skilful portraits) his main preoccupation is traditionally thought to have lain elsewhere, in landscape painting. In one of his letters the artist, referring to himself in the third person, expressed himself "sick of portraits and wishing to take his Viol de Gamba and walk off to some sweet village where he can paint landskips", and although this can scarcely be taken as his final word on the matter, it remains the case that he continued to paint landscapes enthusiastically throughout his career.

The young Gainsborough was evidently much inspired by the eighteenth-century park scenes of Jean-Antoine Watteau with their pairs of gallant lovers, especially in his youthful untitled oil-painting which has often been supposed to depict the newly-married young painter and his wife seated on a bench in a parkland setting (they appear almost "faux-galant" in Gainsborough's version). As Nicola Kalinsky has observed of this piece, "the decorative leafy setting, complete with an Arcadian temple, and Gainsborough's scintillating handling of paint, are all characteristic of Watteau and the French Rococo".

Answer: he had never studied the Italian "Grand Style"

Although Reynolds admired his fellow-artist's graceful portraits and landscapes, he complained that Gainsborough's art was "directed to the living world", and that "his grace was not academical or antique but selected by himself from the great school of nature". Fired by his art studies in Italy, Reynolds believed that more homespun, less intellectual painters like Gainsborough were practising an inferior trade to his own. As the art critic Mary Woodall once commented, these two great rivals of eighteenth-century English painting were in many ways polar opposites, because while Reynolds "filled endless notebooks with studies of pictures seen in the great galleries of Europe, which he used in composing his portraits", Gainsborough on the other hand "painted instinctively, working out his practice from his experience".

Far from being a purely naturalistic artist, however, Gainsborough worked to quite other criteria than this when it suited him: the critic Andrew Graham-Dixon, for one, believes that although not generally much interested in classical themes, the Suffolk artist "possessed the same will to exceed mere depiction which animated the life and work of Reynolds". When he was inspired by a specific visual detail, like a face or a tree or an item of clothing, he could reproduce it to perfection; but when required to paint items which interested him less as objects he found naturalistic effects unnecessary, being more concerned with their symbolic significance.

The artist once wrote, in a letter to Lord Hardwicke, that "with regard to real Views from Nature in this Country", he had "never seen any Place that affords a subject equal to the poorest imitation of Gaspar or Claude". He seldom painted landscapes from life, in fact, although the beautifully naturalistic background of his early "Mr and Mrs Robert Andrews" oil-painting - utterly English in every way with its cornfields and hedges and stiles and woodlands and black rainclouds edging out the fleecy white ones - appears to have been an exception to this rule, and demonstrates how masterfully he could do it. Kenneth Clark, doyen of conservative British art critics, once commented that "this enchanting work is painted with such love and mastery that we should have expected Gainsborough to go further in this direction, but he gave up direct painting, and evolved the melodious style of picture making by which he is best known".

Answer: literary men

According to his musical friend William Jackson, Gainsborough, who was never himself a great reader, "avoided the company of literary men, they were his aversion". He loved music and the theatre, on the other hand, and three of his dearest acquaintances were the actor David Garrick and the composers Carl Friedrich Abel and Johann Christian Bach ("the English Bach"), all three of whom lived in London. Gainsborough's portraits of Garrick, Bach and Abel are all well known and admired (as is the very sensitive portrait of William Wollaston, a Suffolk landowner, amateur flautist and friend of the young Gainsborough's in his Ipswich days).

As for the Royal Family, it is equally well known that, although Reynolds had become the official court painter, it was the more down-to-earth and unpretentious Gainsborough that the royal entourage of George III, Queen Charlotte and their children much preferred sitting for. It was rumoured that the King, in particular, could not stand the sight of Reynolds: be that as it may, however, when Allan Ramsay retired it was Reynolds, not Gainsborough, who became the "King's Painter", in spite of the fact that Gainsborough's pair of royal portraits were generally agreed to have been much more successful than Reynolds's, and Queen Charlotte was known to possess no fewer than twenty-two of Gainsborough's original drawings.

Answer: Jacob van Ruisdael

The extent of Gainsborough's debt to Ruisdael, as to other Dutch landscape painters like Wynants and Hobbema, was very unusual among the English painters of his day. Growing up in the East Anglian county of Suffolk, he would no doubt have felt more at home with the flat Dutch landscapes than would artists from other, hillier parts of England. It is also probably significant that at the very time when the boy artist Gainsborough was learning his trade in London, Dutch landscapes were beginning to infiltrate the English market in a big way.

In his book "Landscape and Western Art", Professor Malcolm Andrews records that "the views of extensive landscapes and huge skies became a distinctive tradition in Dutch seventeenth-century paintings", and that Ruisdael's productions "are cloudscapes almost as much as they are landscapes...it is in the interaction between these two 'scapes that the mapped countryside acquires a dramatic interest". Ruisdael's "mastery of moody atmospherics", as William Vaughan has described it, may be seen quite well reflected in Gainsborough's early landscapes like "Cornard Wood" - sometimes nicknamed "Gainsborough's Forest" - in London's National Gallery. The nineteenth-century critic Roger Fry described this painting as "in effect a transposition of a Dutch landscape into an English mood, and with a freshness and delicacy of feeling which is entirely personal to Gainsborough". Vaughan praises "the dappled fall of light and dark from a cloudy sky so typical of Suffolk...which Constable was to celebrate later".

Gainsborough's use of "staffage" - a pseudo-French word which signifies extra items, especially people and animals, inserted into a landscape painting for decorative effect ("business for the eye", Gainsborough called it) and seen in considerable proliferation in "Cornard Wood" - is also modelled on the practice of Ruisdael and other contemporary Dutch artists. In fact the effect might appear to be rather overdone in this particular work. Nicola Kalinsky, the author of my Phaidon Gainsborough edition, remarks that "the forest does seem a little overcrowded with activity, and it is hard to suggest a specific visual focus". She considers another early piece, "Wooded Landscape with Peasant Resting" (now in the Tate Gallery, London) to be compositionally more satisfactory.

Answer: The National Gallery, London

To turn a corner of the National Gallery and chance upon this painting is to be immediately staggered by its ravishing and very idiosyncratic use of colour - in Mrs Andrews's blue silk dress, for instance, which "is like a piece of fallen sky", as Andrew Graham-Dixon has aptly commented - and by the way in which the tranquillity of its frozen moment somehow seems to pulsate with hidden life. Gainsborough's perceived limitations as a draughtsman pure-and-simple may even be aiding here in the brilliance of the effect: accurate depiction of human anatomy was never his forte, the faces and the costumes being of much more importance both to him and to his sitters; and Nicola Kalinsky, considering "the peg-like figures" of the Andrews couple "with their quaint stiffness", observes that "Gainsborough's bodies are always clothes-horses but he learned to treat costume in a way which suggested the possibility of a graceful form".

In the young Gainsborough's art, the influence of the Dutch landscapists blended with that of French rococo. During his years of apprenticeship in London, the artist's most influential and creative contacts - Hogarth, Hayman and Gravelot - were all popularising this new European style, characterised as it was by elaborate and sometimes asymmetrical curved forms and shell motifs. It was in England that a specific development in rococo art was begun and perfected: the celebrated "conversation-piece", defined in my New Penguin English Dictionary as "a group picture or portrait...in which the subjects are posed in a rural or domestic setting". Hogarth had pioneered this genre, and the "Mr and Mrs Andrews" picture is a brilliant example of it, although it was not Gainsborough's first attempt of this kind.

Robin Gibson and Keith Roberts, in their Phaidon edition of "British Portrait Painters", remark of the delectable "Mr and Mrs Andrews" canvas that "the exquisite refinement of technique and the combination of portraits with landscape are entirely Gainsborough's own and are a new development in English painting". The picture celebrates, says Andrew Graham-Dixon, "a beautiful rather than a crude sensuality and human fruitfulness". The setting is exceptionally, unusually, naturalistic for rococo: Nicola Kalinsky points out how it is "given a prominence equal to the doll-like characters, [and] is not a backdrop of fictitious parkland, but a freshly observed depiction of well-managed and productive fields". Or as Graham-Dixon puts it, as a young artist resident in the market town of Ipswich Gainsborough "made a solid but unspectacular living by painting gentleman farmers and their families in their natural habitat: a lush, pastoral England, which Gainsborough cultivated and improved in art just as his clients did in reality". Left-wing critics like John Berger have preferred to stress the perceived complacency that the Andrews couple may be felt to be showing in their ownership of vast swathes of land, but this seems to me a perverse and potentially demeaning way of reading the picture.

Answer: a butterfly

To paint children in motion cannot be an easy task, but it was just the kind of challenge - hardly tried at all, I believe, in the eighteenth century - which Gainsborough evidently delighted in setting himself. This painting has been widely praised: Gibson and Roberts in their Phaidon book of eighteenth-century English painting, for example, after observing that in such undertakings as this the artist, "like Hogarth with his servants...was not bound by the requirements of his sitters or the conventions of portrait painting", conclude that "this is surely one of the most unaffected and beautiful of all portraits of children".

The story of the two girls' subsequent lives is rather a sad one. William Vaughan recounts how the artist wanted his daughters to learn to fend for themselves "earning their own bread, like his own sisters", but that his wife - not apparently alive to the dangers of giving them ideas above their station - "intended her daughters to marry and lead the lives of ladies". Lacking the class and the fortune for such a match, they experienced considerable social isolation, which worsened when the family subsequently moved to London. There the elder daughter Mary, having made a disastrous and short-lived marriage to a "self-centred and difficult" musician called J. C. Fischer, succumbed to mental illness and was looked after until her death by her younger sister Margaret, who never married.

Apart from individual portraits of the two girls as adults, Gainsborough - scarcely a model husband, by his own admission - also produced, in 1778, a painting of his long-suffering wife of over thirty years. Nicola Kalinsky calls it "a supremely tender portrait, imbued with the painter's intimate knowledge of his subject", and with the sitter's expression "sweetly patient but also knowing and not uncritical". The critic contends, too, that in this picture the artist has equalled the painter who became his chief model for portraits, Anthony van Dyck, in "his ability to convey the translucence of fair skin".

Answer: he welcomed them and tried to encourage as many of them as possible to sit for him

While Reynolds in London was making a particular name for himself with male portraits, Gainsborough in Bath excelled with his female ones. The artist's "notorious weakness", as he himself put it, for "the petticoats" - for the women themselves, that is, not primarily for what they were wearing - seems to have dominated his life. "The keenness of his attraction to beautiful women," writes Andrew Graham-Dixon, "gave his pictures of them a charge of muffled sexuality...channelled into the painting of a dress or the nape of a neck or a half-smile...his women became...unreally tall and gorgeously dressed spirits of nature." The full-length portrait of Mary, Countess Howe was one of the artist's earliest masterpieces after he and his family moved to Bath, where he was in a position to make good money for portraits of rich men of the region and their wives. Portraiture, in fact, made Gainsborough's name in Bath and he experimented with his own version of the "grand manner", taking van Dyck as his model rather than the ancients. On the whole, his depictions of the wives are more memorable than those of their husbands, and give the sense of having been created with more care and attention.

William Vaughan praises the Countess Howe picture for "its stunning combination of 'hauteur' and sensual delight", while his fellow-critic Nicola Kalinsky observes that "costume, pose and setting are all indebted to van Dyck but equally, all these elements are transformed by Gainsborough's unmistakeable stamp of modernity". "These ladies," says Vaughan, "are more independent and individual than their equivalents at the court of Charles I, [and] they belong to a different society, in which the female voice had greater sway." The artist usually preferred, too, to paint his sitters in contemporary costume rather than in historical dress, and although Countess Howe's accoutrements - which modern X-rays have shown Gainsborough laboured long and hard over - may seem fantastical to us, the lady was (as Kalinsky informs us) dressed "entirely 'a la mode', in a gown which would, in the 1760s, have been considered informal and suitable for a stroll".

Gainsborough always prided himself on getting a good likeness in the face. With Countess Howe he seems to have achieved this quite quickly, before embarking on lengthy painstaking attempts to perfect her extravagant-looking dress. The entry on this picture on www.worldsbestpaintings.net suggests mischievously that the artist's "fussing over her costume might have constituted a strategy to necessitate further sittings". This entry also makes sexually suggestive remarks which may sound wildly over-extravagant about a certain broken branch in the painting - signifying, as it were, "a level of appreciation in the painter which surpassed the merely cerebral" - until we remember that the artist was a sophisticated and self-confessed "expert on the petticoats" who was far from averse to implanting symbolic objects and artefacts into his pictures: a broken pitcher in one of the versions of his "Harvest Waggon" painting, for instance, has been plausibly interpreted as an image of lost virginity.

Answer: a dog is barking at a drunken peasant

This indescribably lovely painting is another one from the time of the artist's residence in Bath, and now adorns the walls of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts in my home town of Birmingham. It betrays the influence both of Claude Lorrain and of Rubens, Claude (who, said Kenneth Clark, "could subordinate all his powers of perception and knowledge of natural appearances to the poetic feeling of the whole") in the arrangement of the background landscape, and Rubens in the arrangement of the group of human figures. Surprisingly, this arrangement of figures is modelled not on one of Rubens's landscapes but on a religious work, "The Descent from the Cross", which Gainsborough had earlier copied from an oil sketch of the original altarpiece in Antwerp Cathedral. There might seem something a little sacrilegious in doing such a thing, but the sense of dynamic vitality achieved by so doing would appear to justify all the means utilised.

Nicola Kalinsky comments that "Gainsborough's reaction to Rubens's tragic painting is revealing. The sorrowful downward droop of the linked figures in the altarpiece becomes the inspiration for an upwardly thrusting movement, from the tip of the shoe of the girl being lifted into the waggon, up to the two peasants fighting over a barrel of drink." And although the waggon is just a waggon and no specific evidence of actual harvesting is to be seen here, the picture still evokes for me a phrase by the twentieth-century English poet Stanley Cook, "the sense at least of a perfect harvest", just as it evokes a feeling discernible in many of Gainsborough's landscapes of this period, of "a moment existing outside the normal rules of time", as Kalinsky puts it. (There is reason for believing that Gainsborough's two teenage daughters posed for two of the figures clustering in and around the waggon, one of them pictured in the act of being helped into the waggon and the other already ensconced there.)

Seventeen years later in London, at the height of his popularity, Gainsborough produced a second version of "The Harvest Waggon". As wikipedia observes, "the later painting is more sedate, the figures more composed and less excited" and a gentler, less dynamic piece is the result, in which the two brawling peasants on the waggon have been banished from the scene. It is reported that this second painting was purchased by the young ne'er-do-well Prince of Wales (the future George IV), although it seems likely that the artist never saw the colour of His Royal Highness's money either on this or on other parallel occasions, for it is well known that when Gainsborough died in 1788 he was owed vast sums of money by the said Prince.

Answer: its subject is dressed in typical eighteenth-century costume

The young boy is dressed in historical costume, not of the eighteenth but of the mid-seventeenth century, which led to some catty remarks by Reynolds about Gainsborough's having copied van Dyck, who certainly became a major influence on the artist's portrait-painting style during his time in Bath. Most critics, in fact, have found this influence a very benign one: William Vaughan, for example, praises Gainsborough's having taken "the wistful mood of van Dyck's portraits" and then "transposed it...to the early romanticism of the later eighteenth century". Gainsborough studied the Old Masters in the country houses he visited around Bath, and was particularly attracted to van Dyck, making several copies of his portraits and, as Vaughan observes, "absorbing the repertoire of elegant Renaissance poses which van Dyck had himself acquired through study in Italy".

Gainsborough's portrait seems to have had its genesis, at least in part, in the taking up of a challenge implied in something Joshua Reynolds had written regarding the appropriate colouring effects to be used in a successful painting. "It ought, in my opinion, to be indispensably observed," asserted Reynolds, "that the masses of light in a picture be always of a warm, mellow colour, yellow, red, or a yellowish white, and that the blue, the grey, or the green colours be kept almost entirely out of these masses, and be used only to support or to set off these warm colours; and for this purpose, a small proportion of cold colour will be sufficient." Gainsborough may be said to have brilliantly refuted this opinion in "The Blue Boy".

At any rate, this portrait has become iconic, and indeed almost comparable to the "Mona Lisa" in its ready adaptation to modernist and post-modernist kitsch, its image reproduced, as Vaughan observes, on "countless biscuit tins, chocolate boxes, dolls and porcelain figurines" - and there is even a cod portrait called "The Blue Duck" in the Walt Disney Gallery of Old Masters. Nevertheless it is still worth considering the original - or so one would like to think, at least - as something deserving of appreciation in itself. In 1921 there was a terrible public outcry in Britain, as we learn from wikipedia, when "'The Blue Boy' was sold...to the American railway pioneer Henry Edwards Huntington for...a then-record price for any painting." It now resides in the Huntington Gallery in California, opposite the twin masterpiece of "Pinkie" by Sir Thomas Lawrence, a younger English genius of portrait-painting whose artistic debt to Gainsborough was considerable.

Answer: View at the Mouth of the Thames

Gainsborough came to seascapes quite late in life, and found new possibilities in the traditionally Dutch genre to awaken his marvellous sense of nuance in colour and tone. This is not the original title of the piece, which was first exhibited at the Royal Academy as "Sea-Piece: A Calm", and is seen by Nicola Kalinsky as "an imaginative homage to the work of the Dutch seventeenth-century sea-painters". Horace Walpole, having visited the original exhibition, quipped with his usual good-humoured frivolity that "Gainsborough has two pieces with land and sea. So natural that one steps back for fear of being splashed". Mary Woodall praises "View at the Mouth of the Thames" as being "infinitely restful with its wide expanse of hazy sky and lovely blue-grey tones". Some doubt has been cast on whether this is a picture of a real scene, or not rather an impressionistic view of what the artist remembered the mouth of the Thames to be like: at any rate, it is a very convincing prospect.

Gainsborough, like Reynolds, was also certainly affected by the presence in London of the inventive and versatile Franco-British painter Philip James de Loutherbourg - known, as wikipedia informs us, for "his large naval works, his elaborate set designs for London theatres, and his invention of a mechanical theatre called the 'Eidophusikon'". Gainsborough's sea paintings are not very like those of de Loutherbourg, who tended to favour dramatic reconstructions of naval battles, but he was fascinated by certain of his fellow-artist's mechanical inventions to the extent of developing a 'peep-show' box of his own as a useful practice tool for reproducing scenes on canvas with oil paint. (He also started practising painting on glass, and two such paintings of "View at the Mouth of the Thames" have survived.)

Answer: The Mall in St James's Park

For the last fourteen years of his life Gainsborough rented part of Schomberg House in London's Pall Mall - "noticeably smarter than Reynolds's residence in Leicester Square", William Vaughan rather cattily remarks. The artist seems to have been hoping particularly for aristocratic commissions for portraits, but this striking social scene - apparently one he could have witnessed from his window - is often regarded as one of the most fascinating of all his pictures. Jean-Honoré Fragonard's painting "A Shaded Avenue" may also be suggested as a possible starting-point, giving Gainsborough the germ of an idea for a painting which he developed much further than Fragonard had done.

According to the artist's friend William Jackson, this ravishing display of society ladies, with scarcely a gentleman in attendance, in its romantically decorative setting was painted from dolls made by Gainsborough himself - he seldom painted directly from life, in fact, so that when he claimed to paint "strictly from nature" we should probably interpret this in a metaphorical sense. Henry Bate, editor of the "Morning Herald", praised the depiction of "women of fashion, women of frolic, military beaus, and 'petits maitres', with a grave keeper or two", while Horace Walpole, understandably enthusiastic about the gorgeous colours and brushwork of the painting, gushed that the work was "all a flutter like a ladies' fan". The critic Mary Woodall cites the artist's contemporary admirer Bate Dudley as giving his opinion that Gainsborough had even surpassed the great master of rococo, Jean-Antoine Watteau, in this outstanding piece.

Gainsborough's painting, says Nicola Kalinsky, depicts "the flirtatious and amusing atmosphere of London's pleasure grounds, gardens and fashionable promenades" that the artist will have known so well, the critic adding perceptively that "the super-abundant foliage seems charged with a vital force." Andrew Graham-Dixon - in his racy and often controversial "History of British Art" - goes further, maintaining that "in this beautiful and very pastoral townscape, peopled by the ideal goddesses that had inhabited his imagination all his life, we see a compulsion finally and forever transfigured. The urge and the harassment of Gainsborough's continual sexual yearning has become the vision of an earthly paradise". Graham-Dixon notices "at the centre of the painting...what looks suspiciously like a disguised self-portrait: the figure of a soldier, pierced to the heart by the beauty around him". Shady sexual practices were known, in fact, continually to take place behind the screen of this "super-abundant foliage" in St James's Park, and what the artist does not depict because it is hidden from view is probably intended to be understood as part of the subterranean meaning of the whole work.

Answer: he favoured very short paintbrushes at all times

"The artist," Graham-Dixon informs us, "would go for long walks, gathering together pieces of rock, bits of moss and lichen, and bring them back to his studio. There he would build them into intricate little tabletop landscapes, using pieces of mirrored glass to suggest water. Then he would black out all the windows in his house, light candles, and go to work copying the small, flickering, shaded worlds he had made. This helps to explain the shimmering, almost abstract quality of his landscape paintings and of the landscapes in which he so often placed his sitters...His favourite paintbrush is said to have been six feet long and to have shaken like a fishing rod when he painted with it. Gainsborough wanted the effect of beautiful vagueness...everything in his world had to look as though it had been touched by magic." Gainsborough's fervent admirer, the later American painter James MacNeill Whistler, copied his idol's practice - as William Vaughan informs us - "of using brushes several feet long to achieve broad tonal effects in his pictures". (Whistler even painted a "Blue Girl" - later destroyed - in honour of Gainsborough.)

The oil-painting "Mountain Landscape with Shepherd" is an idealised view of the Langdale Pikes composed during Gainsborough's sketching tour of the newly-fashionable English Lake District in the summer of 1783. Like various other works of his, it features figures of cows and sheep which appear to have been worked up from small plaster models in the artist's possession: not only that, but we can surely also observe here Gainsborough's little models of rocks and mosses intervening between the actual view and the finished painting. Nicola Kalinsky observes that "as an idyllic evocation of an upland pastoral scene, this painting has undoubted charm, but the atmosphere has none of the impressive, awesome grandeur which visitors to the Lake District expected. The overriding impression is that the artist has created the composition". But what visitors to the area expected is not necessarily what the artist wanted to give them: as Vaughan remarks, Gainsborough "turned the specific into the general. Despite drawing inspiration from nature, Gainsborough firmly set himself against making topographical records".

Answer: they usually show classical or allegorical themes

The Oxford Dictionary of Art and Artists defines "fancy picture" as "a term applied to certain types of sentimental genre pictures", adding that the term "refers to paintings that have a rather charmingly contrived air, showing figures - particularly children - playing out various roles". Whereas Reynolds's fancy pictures went in for classical or allegorical themes, Gainsborough's comparable pieces "usually have contemporary pastoral settings, depicting idealised peasants who behave rather more as if they are in the studio than in the countryside". (The Romantic critic William Hazlitt did not mean to be complimentary when he summed up such productions as "Nature sitting for its portrait". In our own time, William Vaughan has similarly belittled this part of Gainsborough's work as "figurative scenes of country children and rustic lovers that we now see as sentimental or even uneasily prurient", adding however that in the artist's day they "were widely admired as his most original creations, full of natural feeling".)

Gainsborough's portraits of winsome cottage girls may at least serve to remind us of the later eighteenth century's growing interest in children, in the wake of the Enlightenment, for their own sake rather than merely as future adults. "Girl with Pigs", one of the most celebrated examples, was actually bought by Reynolds, who - for reasons now difficult to fathom - thought it was the best thing Gainsborough had ever done. In this genre, Gainsborough - like Reynolds - painted from life, bringing children in off the street as models, and the young pigs depicted on the canvas were often to be seen gambolling around the studio during the painting sessions. As a good English countryman Gainsborough delighted in having animals around him, and in getting as good likenesses in his paintings of horses and dogs as he did of his human sitters. Nicola Kalinsky quotes one gnarled old countryman, on observing the pigs in this picture, conceding that "they be deadly like pigs", but then adding a critical comment about the unnatural tidiness of everything in the painting that points to the lack of realism so typical of this genre: "Nobody ever saw pigs feeding together but what one on 'em had a foot in the trough."

Answer: Diana and Actaeon

In this picture the distinguished portraitist and landscape artist enters for the first time what his biographer William Vaughan calls "a world he had always forbidden himself - that of the naked figure". Much has been written, especially in recent decades, about Gainsborough's suppressed sex drive and here, in a story which lends itself to voyeuristic treatment - the hunter Actaeon catching the goddess Diana and her nymphs bathing in a stream, and being transformed into a stag for punishment, as a prelude to being torn to pieces by his own hounds - sexual feeling at last threatens to come to the surface in his art. Perhaps it is no coincidence, bearing this in mind, that the artist never finished this work.

Latent eroticism has in fact been detected in many earlier Gainsborough works, too: Andrew Graham-Dixon has cited the sexual symbolism of Mr Andrews's gun and Mrs Andrews's "melted, languorous look" in "Mr and Mrs Robert Andrews", for example, which - denying that it exposes Gainsborough as "a small artist, a charmer, a mere hireling of the rich" - the critic calls "in its quiet, understated way one of the masterpieces of erotic painting". All his life, says Graham-Dixon, Gainsborough "was chasing the creature of his dreams: the idea of a perfect, completely desirable woman". The culmination of all this may be descried in "Diana and Actaeon", which the critic responds to rhapsodically: "a man helpless before the vision of a goddess...a work with the frail, flickering loveliness of a Cézanne painted 100 years 'avant la lettre'...in this picture everything seems to be turning into something else, water into smoke, nude women into water or trees".

Answer: I fancy I see Gainsborough in every hedge and hollow tree.

The hypersensitive Constable also remarked of Gainsborough's paintings that "on looking at them, we find tears in our eyes and know not what brought them". Gainsborough's late "Market Cart" canvas clearly looks forward to Constable, and - more specifically - is generally agreed to have influenced the younger artist's famous, indeed iconic, "Haywain" picture. There appears to be in both paintings, which are now twin jewels in the crown of London's National Gallery, a similar wish-fulfilling evocation of a vanished idyll. "'The Market Cart'," says William Vaughan, "truly seems to be a foreshadowing of the celebration of local scenery that Constable later achieved. Like Constable's, too, it was only made when he was living in the city and was looking back nostalgically at his view of the country." And not only Gainsborough but Constable too, adds Malcolm Andrews, was "able to keep himself 'unspoiled' by distancing himself both from the larger social world of London and the troubled conditions of life in Suffolk, and by inhabiting the naturalistically rendered utopia of his painted England".

Twentieth-century evaluation has tended to make what Vaughan calls "an emphasis on the more spontaneous and intuitive side" of Gainsborough's art: at the artist's bicentenary exhibition in Ipswich in 1927, both Gainsborough and Constable were singled out by the Bloomsbury critic Roger Fry as rare examples of "true painting in the English school", not "sullied by vulgarity and a non-pictorial interest in narrative". "The Market Cart" and "The Haywain" depict and capture imaginary moments in time: they do not form a part of any particular story. "A highly individual note," Vaughan remarks finally of this picture, "is provided by the figure of the woodcutter emerging from beneath the trees in front of the richly laden cart. This could be taken as an image of Gainsborough himself, encountering his own fantasy."