Reading about the re-opening of Gainsborough’s House after a three year renovation costing £9 million I reflected.
Galleries and museums are forever improving their space at somebody else’s expense. Sometimes it works, like Pallant House in Chichester. Usually it means a better shop and cafeteria; just look at The Serpentine Gallery fungus.
It seems to me there wasn’t much wrong with Gainsborough’s house in Sudbury (above, pre-refurb). These sort of projects should be funded by philanthropists, local government and the public. Local government is closer to the project and has less funding, both good. I’m not sorry the ENO has lost its hand-out from taxpayers. I am sorry it refused to take its medicine a decade ago. Subsidies create complacency and a poor allocation of money. Spending somebody else’s money is much easier and more fun than spending one’s own. In the City, where I worked for 39 years, we had to make money. That meant embracing new technology, making tough choices and either getting on with it or getting out.
Nevertheless, I rather fancy a gander at Gainsborough and a mooch around the Munnings Museum at Dedham – they are only fifteen miles apart but in another sense a world apart. Sir Alfred Munnings lived in Dedham from 1919 until his death in 1959. Thomas Gainsborough left Sudbury in 1752 after only living there for four years after he inherited his father’s house in 1748, when he was twenty-three and by no means established as the great portrait and landscape painter he became.
Gainsborough’s problem was there weren’t enough clients around Sudbury. He had married in 1746, had bills to pay and was ambitious. This reminds me of Frans Hals who made his sitters come to him in Haarlem. You may remember an exhibition of his portraits at The Wallace Collection last year (Ruff Trade). Gainsborough, daringly, moved to Ipswich and then as he became richer to Bath where he made friends and found clients. Ultimately he lived and died in London.
There’s no reason why Gainsborough shouldn’t be embraced by Sudbury, a town on which he turned his back as soon as poss. Rossini left Pesaro when he was ten but is celebrated with an annual festival of his operas – a local boy made good like Gainsborough.
The sitter is only sixteen, although he looks older. The Gainsboroughs were friends of the Linleys in Bath but that’s a story for another day.