This Gainsborough portrait is far from his most famous and you may wonder why it was the coda of a recent post, Sudbury’s Son.
You will have detected it is a photograph from a book.
It is a gratifying economy in these hard times that friends give me books, sometimes the authors of same. You see above the same Thomas (“Tommasino”) Linley by the same Thomas Gainsborough painted in 1768, four days after his twelfth birthday. If you’d like to see it, I do, unfortunately it’s part of the one way trans-Atlantic art alley and we will have to go to The Sterling and Francine Clark Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Here’s how Tony Scotland describes it.
“The picture is a charming study of the children as ‘A Beggar Boy and Girl’, wearing peasant clothes in rustic surroundings. A puckish Tom, with thick auburn hair and large, bright eyes, looks – a little warily – at the viewer, and leans his head towards the safety of his sister’s shoulder. Elizabeth, aged thirteen and a half – going on twenty – gazes sadly into the distance over his head. Knowing he’ll soon be far away for three years, she’s already missing him.
Gainsborough recorded that he was painting ‘a large Picture of Tommy Linley & his sister’, adding that ‘The Boy is bound for Italy the first opportunity’. ”
PG Wodehouse was supremely good at setting a scene at the opening of a novel. Perhaps unconsciously, Tony Scotland evokes his style in the opening paragraph of Tommasino.
“Grimsthorpe Castle 5 August 1778
Tom had finished his two hours’ practice, and the sun was streaming into his bedchamber after last night’s rain. He moved the music stand back against the wall, and slipped his violin into its green baize bag. Then he raised the sash window and looked out across the park towards the Great Water. The sky was blue, and a warm breeze was drying the leaves on the trees, but he could still smell wet grass and something else in the air, something pungent, like old mushrooms. The swallows, he noticed, were flying low. Perhaps there was a storm on the way. He pulled the bell for a valet, he did not have a servant of his own, preferring always to dress himself, but the duke had provided one for the summer.”
Wow! What next? Another book you should hope to find beneath the Christmas tree this year.
One of my favorite paintings in the Clark. They have some very nice things, including Constables and Turners, some less successful Gainsborough paintings and good sketches, wonderful paintings by Boldini, Madrazo, Alma-Tadema, if you like that sort of thing (I do), very good JS Sargents and Winslow Homers, a lot of Impressionists, Goya etchings, etc. Also fine decorative arts and silver. Well worth a detour if you chance to be nearby. It was one of our favorite destinations from the house in upstate NY.