Two Portraits

Barrie Sheppard continues to reflect on 18th century portraiture. Barrie writes: Both Sir Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough painted portraits of Mrs Sarah Siddons, the acclaimed Welsh-born English actress famous for her tragic roles, particularly that of Lady Macbeth.

Reynolds painted her in 1784 as Sarah Siddons as the Tragic Muse; Gainsborough in 1785 as simply Mrs Siddons.

Reynolds’ Mrs Siddons is painted in the “grand style”, the defining elements of which Reynolds listed and elaborated upon in his Fourth Discourse. He began with the controlling principle that the style deals not with “particularities”, but with the “general”.

• In invention and composition, a grand style portrait is presented as a common human experience, not a particular experience peculiar to individual subject.

• Though a likeness is to be achieved, the sitter’s image is to be idealised; there are to be no peculiarities, such as unnatural distortions of form or skin blemishes – no “warts”, that is. Simon Schama’s description of academic classicism in his book ‘Rembrandt’s Eyes‘ fits Reynolds’ principle perfectly: its task was to edit nature so that the impurities of mundane life were cleansed from it; to push the real toward the ideal, the material toward the ineffable, the flesh toward the spirit. Art was not a report from the world, it was a transformation of it. Rembrandt’s aesthetic was, of course, the polar opposite to Reynolds’.

• Colour is to be governed by simplicity – trifling or artful play of little lights, or an attention to a variety of tints is to be avoided.

• Drapery, again, is to be general: In the same manner as the history painter never enters into the detail of colour, so neither does he debase his conceptions with minute attention to discriminations of drapery. It is the inferior style that marks the variety of stuffs (cloths).

Reynolds’ Sarah Siddons conforms to the grand manner. By depicting her as the mythological tragic muse (the Greek, Melpomena) he has classicised her, elevating the portrait above what to him was the lower genre to that of the highest – from portrait to history painting.

In form and pose she evokes mannerist Renaissance figures. When she entered his painting room, without instruction from him, she took her seat on his sitters’ “throne” in the pose he wanted her to adopt (the” throne” was a swivelled chair to allow easy adjustment according to lighting conditions). He commented that she had taken up, naturally, the classical pose. She replied, however, that she simply sat and looked up and gestured to the right in response to a painting hanging on the nearby wall.

The face, though recognizable as Mrs Siddons, has no “peculiarities’ that individualise her. And her dress makes no reference to current fashion: it is of the one material, its colour monochrome, neutral.

Gainsborough’s Mrs Siddons couldn’t be more different. She is the social Mrs Siddons, a feature indicated by the title: she is Mrs Siddons portrayed as if she is waiting to be collected for some social occasion, perhaps lunch, or a concert. Her dress is the high fashion of the time, something Reynolds advised against because modish dress, he said, would in time date the portrait and so work against its being timeless, as is the ideal.

The fabrics of Gainsborough’s Mrs Siddons are various, their kinds, no doubt, identifiable. The colouring is rich, vivid and varied – gorgeous in the original sense of that word – the scarlet red of the drape behind her is picked up by the red of her lips, and contrasted with her flamboyant black hat. And her make-up marks her as a woman of the society she inhabits.  Gainsborough’s colouring is what Reynolds considered florid, gorgeous in the manner of the Venetians Veronese and Tintoretto, and of the Flemish Rubens. And, as such, to be eschewed.

Gainsborough’s Mrs Siddons exudes éclat; Reynolds’ is mannered, traditional.

The poet/artist William Blake thought Reynolds’ grand manner “the enemy of art”. It’s fortunate that he, Reynolds didn’t always practise what he preached, a contradiction Blake was alive to.