You can’t ‘A Ford’ to offend

Barrie Sheppard continues to take us into the world of 18th century British artists – this time Thomas Gainsborough. Barrie writes: Just as in our world a property developer builds a display house to demonstrate to prospective buyers the best of his house designs, and a car dealer displays his latest gleaming luxury model in a glossy show room, so might a portrait painter mount an example of his best work in his private gallery, or painting room. Thus did Thomas Gainsborough soon after arriving in Bath in 1759.

His subject was Ann Ford, a flamboyant, extroverted, talented singer and instrumentalist who had taken Bath audiences by storm. Ford was surrounded by controversy – she performed in public and women just didn’t do that. Her father had opposed her public appearances, even to the extent of trying to have her arrested when she performed in London, but that failed and she continued to defy him.

The portrait, full-length and approximately seven feet by five, commanded Gainsborough’s painting room, Dominating the composition, Ford sits cross-legged, somewhat risqué for a woman at the time, her pose creating an S-bend  cascading in a shimmering white of ruffled silk. She, confident and assured, looks beyond the viewer to her right. Her left arm rests on a pile of music, some of which can be read. Her hand nonchalantly fingers a lock of her hair behind her ear.

She cradles a guitar. And emerging from a darkened background, partly hidden by a passionate-red, silk drape that sets off her form  bringing her forward in the picture space, stands her viol de Gamba. The presence of the instruments and the manuscripts, establishes her identity as a performer, as well as giving vent to Gainsborough’s passion for music.

A story attaches to the viol de Gamba, one that says something about Gainsborough’s working practices, and his eccentric passion for music.

Anne Ford had married Philip Thicknesse, Gainsborough’s friend, though “acquaintance” might be a more accurate term for the relationship. Gainsborough had painted a second portrait of Ann as Mrs Thicknesse.

At a gathering of the three, Gainsborough, buoyed by a little too much to drink, played a piece on Mrs Thicknesse’s viol de Gamba, a lesson taught him by the German composer Carl Friedrich Abel, an outstanding exponent of the instrument. Ann was charmed, and, knowing of his love of the instrument, offered it to him as payment for a portrait she proposed of her husband, one to be companion to the second he painted of her (now lost). Gainsborough took up the offer, but was reluctant to take the instrument until the portrait was painted. She, however, sent it to him the following morning.

Thicknesse sat once for the portrait. The underpainting was done and suggestions of the head and a dog were brushed in, but little else. After some considerable time, with the portrait not forthcoming, Mrs Thicknesse visited Gainsborough’s painting room only to find him working on a commissioned work, her husband’s portrait sidelined and being used, as she saw it, as a foil to the portrait he was working on. She was upset, and wrote to Gainsborough asking him to place her husband’s unfinished portrait in his loft so that it not be used as a foil. Gainsborough immediately returned the viol de Gamba. Later, he sent the unfinished portrait to Thicknesse, who promptly returned it, describing it later as looking like a scarecrow.

Gainsborough, thus didn’t acquire Mrs Thicknesse’s viol de Gamba to add to his store of musical instruments, a collection he had acquired from a number of musicians by obsessively importuning them to sell, raising his offers until they couldn’t refuse. By this means he acquired a violin, a viol de Gamba, a harp, a hautboy and a lute.

Such was his passion. But, to his friends’ amusement, and sometimes their annoyance, he could play none of them well, if at all. So much did he invest in merely possessing the instruments, and his playing of them being so poor, that his friend, William Jackson, wrote that it was as if Gainsborough  believed that the beauty of what he heard resided in the instruments themselves, rather than in the talented performances of the musicians who played them.

Postscript:

Thank you, Barrie, we look forward to more fascinating gossip from the Georgian art world!