“I’m sick of Portraits and wish very much to take my Viol da Gamba and walk off to some sweet Village where I can paint Landskips and enjoy the very End of Life in quietness and ease.”

Thomas Gainsborough claimed to prefer painting landscapes, but is best known as a leading and very prolific C18 portrait painter. After moving to London in later life, and famous enough to be invited to paint George III and Queen Charlotte, he became quite well off.

Hamilton’s opening chapter portrays Gainsborough as sociable, charming and generous, but also subject to mood swings, and bursts of rage, as when he slashed a canvas which a client had rejected. His friend the actor Garrick’s description of his mind as like a “steam engine overcharged” with genius implies a manic quality. As a young man, he was more harshly criticised as “very dissolute…inordinately fond of women”, which eventually seems to have led to an attack of venereal disease which nearly killed him. He was also often in debt, despite his high work rate, painting “upon his feet….during five or six hours every day”, and a wife who came with a useful annual annuity, the result of being the illegitimate daughter of a prince. Hamilton suggests that the cost of keeping his wife and daughters as well-dressed “advertisements” for his work was initially more than he could afford!

In later life, Gainsborough could chat informally to the king with ease, but was too unorthodox to “play the game” as a member of The Royal Academy, to the extent that when he complained about the way his pictures were being hung at the 1784 Academy Exhibition, he was simply ordered to take them down!

Although at pains to write a biography, Hamilton’s expertise as an art historian has led him to analyse in some detail the painter’s work, with coloured plates usefully provided for many of the examples, but often too small in the paperback edition to appreciate sufficiently. So it is worth looking up images of them online. Gainsborough’s portraits of the gentry and aristocrats are often rather stiff, and the backgrounds may be of greater interest, as in the famous painting of Mr. and Mrs Andrews crammed one side of arable fields clearly depicted the husband’s new farming methods. Beautiful, elaborate dresses, displaying skill in painting silks and velvets, were often added afterwards, neither belonging to or ever worn by the sitters. Some of the most striking portraits, with a photographic quality of realism, focus on the faces of friends, who often had to wait months to receive them as gifts, since they were painted in between more lucrative commissions.

One of the most fascinating aspects, although we have to wait to Chapter 25 to discover it, is Gainsborough’s unusual approach to painting. He liked to work in darkened rooms, lit only by flickering candlelight, with a large canvas tied loosely to a frame so that it billowed slightly like a sail, while the sitter’s head was positioned only inches away from the painting of it. Gainsborough worked with great physical energy, continually stepping backwards and forwards. Most extraordinary of all, he is reputed to have painted at times with long-handled, six foot brushes, which must have been larger, ordinary brushes tied to flexible handles of say, willow or hazel.

Another intriguing fact is that, whereas from boyhood, growing up in Suffolk he painted landscapes from observation of nature, later on he would construct landscapes to copy, using heads of brocolli for trees. Endlessly experimental, he would use his fingers, bits of sponge, even on an impulse sugar-tongs to apply paint.

Hamilton creates a strong sense of place as regards where Gainsborough spent most of his life. As a boy, it was Sudbury in Suffolk, where the once prosperous wool and cloth weaving trade had declined, leaving a politically corrupt sytem and discontented population. It was only the small inheritance from an uncle who had made money from property ownership in the depressed town which enabled Gainsborough, aged only 13, to escape to London as an apprenticed engraver – “some light, handy craft trade”.

The descriptions of Bath are fascinating, particularly if one happens to live there. There is the irony of the unhealthy nature of a spa town with the smoke from coal fires trapped in the valley, “set so deep …air was apt to stagnate”. In summer, “the air was thick with the chalk and dust thrown up by traffic….which in the wet and cold of winter became a deep mire”. Those who came to take the waters would have been better off staying at home in view of the sedan chairs used to transport the gouty and rheumatic, which were reduced to boxes of sodden leather in the frequent rainy days.

Apart from the sensitive, appealing portraits of his two daughters when little girls, and one of his wife as an older woman, with a direct, quizzical gaze, Gainsborough’s immediate family members remain two-dimensional. He is described as hen-pecked, but perhaps his wife had good reason to control his income from portraits. It is unclear why Hamilton calls the daughters “troublesome”. The elder daughter may have inherited a more extreme form of the painter’s possibly somewhat manic personality. For her to be considered “mad” may have led to her short-lived marriage being a failure, with her younger sister being forced into the role of a spinster carer. Probably, there is simply a lack of information to explore these family dynamics further. Yet there is a vivid image of Thomas wondering how best to dispose of his deceased brother Humphey’s invention of a by then rotting steam engine. Clearly, they were talented members of an “ordinary” family.

Similarly, I would have liked Gainsborugh’s uneasy relationship with Joshua Reynolds to have been presented more fully and clearly. Was it more than the case of an orthodox President of the Royal Academy criticising Gainsborough, even after his death, for “a want of precision and finishing” which Hamilton sees as “brave, flamboyant exuberance”?

Overall, the biography is meticulously researched and a mine of information. Yet reading it proves a laborious task at times, largely through a lack of rigorous editing to remove the frequent repetition, tedious lists of, say, lients or paintings, and long-winded digressions. I found Gainsborough’s chequered relationship with The Royal Academy too fragmented and hard to follow. The tendency to speculate in the absence of evidence or impossibilty of knowing how Gainsborough could have reacted to the present could also be quite irritating.

Despite these reservations, I recommend this biography, having gleaned a great deal from it.