Mrs Douglas
Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788)
Date: 1784
Place Made: England
Materials & Techniques: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 234.8 x 145.4 cm
Accession Number: Waddesdon Manor 313.1997
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Mrs. Douglas is shown sitting outside reading a letter. Perhaps it is from her husband. She looks thoughtful and leans her head on her hand. Artists often used this pose to suggest melancholy. Mrs. Douglas is not sitting in a neat garden. Look at the overhanging rock and the overgrown plants. They suggest she has looked for somewhere away from buildings and other people where she can be alone.
Gainsborough painted this portrait with oil paints on canvas. He first covered the canvas with a layer of pink paint. This shows through in several places, especially in the sky.
Elsewhere the paint is built up in thick layers, for example, the skirt and bodice. The see-through shawl lying across Mrs. Douglas’s lap was painted very quickly. Gainsborough suggested its lightness with long looping brushstrokes – as though it is fluttering in a breeze.
Gainsborough changed the picture as he went along, for example he moved the edge of the pillar, the position of the feet and the dress’s hemline. The portrait was cleaned recently. The old varnish had gone yellow. When it was removed the subtlety of the colouring was revealed once again, particularly the different whites of flesh, paper, satin and pearls.
Teachers' Information
This painting is a wonderful example of a type of portrait particularly associated with Gainsborough – a woman in a landscape, in which the setting and bold, spontaneous brushwork evoked naturalness and sensibility. The rapid brushstrokes animate the surface of the painting and unify the sitter with the landscape. When this portrait of Mrs. Douglas was first exhibited, in 1784, one commentator wrote: ‘An air of sensibility and solitude is diffused over her countenance’. Gainsborough’s only real rival, Joshua Reynolds, described how his paintings were made up of marks that were illegible close-up:
"all those odd scratches and marks, which, on a close examination, are so observable in Gainsborough’s pictures, and which even to the experienced painters appear rather the effect of accident than design; this chaos, this uncouth and shapeless appearance, by some kind of magick, at a certain distance assumes form, and all the parts seem to drop into their places."
Much of the impact of Gainsborough’s work depends upon the contrast between areas of thick, ridged paint and areas of thin, translucent paint. He sometimes thinned his paint so much that it ran off his palette unless he held it absolutely straight. He was fascinated by the effects of light: the sheen of fabrics, luminous skies and faces which seem to be illuminated from within. Some of the pentimenti (artist’s changes) are visible to the naked eye. Others can only be seen with x-rays and other technologies.
Activities
1. How does Gainsborough suggest the feel of different materials within the scene? Ask your pupils to describe the different textures they can see in the pictures and to examine the surface of the painting closely for how these have been painted.
2. Explore the different marks made using very long and very short brushes (Gainsborough sometimes attached his paintbrushes to sticks six feet long), and using thin and thick paint.