Gainsborough Girls

I saw this Gainsborough at the Fitzwilliam when I went to their Degas exhibition before Christmas. Incidentally the Fitzwilliam had bad luck because there is Degas at the Petit Palais in Paris running concurrently and they probably picked the plums.

When Cecil Beaton was at Cambridge (History, Art and Architecture at St John’s) he noticed it too. Years later he read a life of Gainsborough and was interested in his snobbish, spinster daughters: Mary and Margaret. They were often painted by their father.

He must have been enchanted by The Gainsborough Girls … as the title for a play that he eventually wrote. His sets and costumes were pretty good but the play was a flop.

Reading his diaries I am aware of Cecil’s huge ambition. He could take photographs, paint and draw, design stage and film sets and costumes, seduce Greta Garbo but he wanted to do more. He wanted to tread on the toes of Noël and Terence. My brother had a similar conceit. Not content with huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ in the rain in Ireland his gardens have established his reputation as the Leinster Capability Brown. Like Beaton he extended himself, a Renaissance man if you will, into poetry and drama. His three one act plays are played, appropriately, in the drawing room at Barmeath. They owe a lot to Pinter – not many words – and they are vastly assisted by the leading man, clad in a cravat, being played by the author.

Here is Beaton on Rattigan. “Terry is by nature rather lazy … construction is of the greatest interest to him and even the New Statesman admits he knows all about the well-knit play. He studies Ibsen, Shaw and Pinero for the way in which they create their effects, but he said he had learnt most from Shakespeare.” Beaton certainly wasn’t lazy but he did not work on his play hard enough; my brother ditto.