Mr & Mrs Andrews
Would you wear a beautiful silk dress to sit out in the middle of a field?
Well, apparently Mrs Andrews did.
Who, you may ask is Mrs Andrews?
Mr and Mrs Andrews were a couple who in the eighteenth century had their portraits painted by one of the most famous artists of the time, Thomas Gainsborough. I’m very interested in this painting because of my love of the English landscape and how it has been portrayed through the ages.
If you go back a little further you find that the great outdoors is heavily stylized – more or less a tapestry backdrop for the main action, a procession, a Biblical scene, an important event or an image from classical mythology. This was because nature, from time immemorial, was considered dangerous and life threatening. You really didn’t know what was out there and going to get you.
But this wasn’t just any field. Mr Andrews owned all that the eye could see, this is why the couple are portrayed to the left of the painting under a venerable oak tree to suggest permanence through inheritance and to show as much land as possible. This is a painting about ownership. Ownership of the land and everything it produced, including the right to shoot any game he liked. Ownership of the hunting dogs. To a high degree, ownership of the work force. And, of course, total ownership of Mrs Andrews.
They are a young couple, recently married. This would have been an arranged marriage and doubtless the dowry that Mrs Andrews brought to the marriage, probably from her mercantile family. may have been substantial enough to have either bought the estate that her husband ruled over or rescued it from debtors. Mrs Andrews had no ownership and little rights over the dowry paid to her husband – he could do whatever he liked with it. It would be another hundred and fifty years or so until the married womans’ property act.
There appears to be no feeling between the couple, in fact the dog seems to show more affection for Mr Andrews than his wife who has in her hand what is thought to be her marriage contract. She sits on a bench that is totally out of place in the field whilst he lounges upright beside and slightly behind her, his left hand resting on the bench with his gun over his right arm.
Their double portrait would have been painted inside, probably in Gainsboroughs’ studio, hence the sumptuous materials of the clothes. The “real” quality of the landscape would have been captured in a series of outdoor studies which were only just becoming popular. The two elements would then be fused together back in the studio to form the final work. I have a photograph from the early 1900s of my Grandma posed in front of a painted landscape backdrop so this idea of fusing different elements was used in different disciplines and probably still is in different ways.
Gainsborough is recorded as saying that landscape painting was his first love but it didn’t pay the bills so he had to make a living by painting portraits at which he also excelled. There is acute observation of both genres in this painting. Paint and colour is applied with a light touch and the composition is quite daring for the time as it defies some contemporary thought. But what, importantly, it does do is to record in pictorial form the lives of two people legally joined together, their place in society and in the English landscape of the late eighteenth century
In Britain the middle and upper middle classes – the merchants and industrialists wanted to show their wealth- what they had made-how much they possessed, and during the eighteenth century it became common for portraits of people and their wealth to be portrayed through art.
People in the garden in front of their newly built houses having tea (another expensive commodity) from their silver tea sets and very expensive porcelain tea bowls, the master of the house riding over his land and his wife in her carriage and so on. A picture of everyday life you might think.
To balance this out have a look at the work of William Hogarth, either “Marriage a la Mode” or “The Rakes Progress”
We end with a re-imagining of the Gainsborough painting by Lin Jannet.
Which do you think is the more accurate portrayal?
You can see the original and a wonderful almost pastiche by the late Lin Jammet, son of Elizabeth Frink the sculpyor and architect Michel Jammet.
