uncompleted at his death. He helped his brother ‘Scheming Jack’ with many a five-pound note, only to be wasted in brass for mechanical experiments. He has left behind in a fine portrait a record of the affection which always subsisted between him and his brother Humphry. Indeed, in spite of his unevenness of temper and capriciousness, he appears to have been of so genial a disposition that he never had a downright quarrel with any of his relations or friends, if we except that with Philip Thicknesse, who quarrelled with everybody from his fellow-officers to his son.
Before he died there took place that meeting between him and his great rival Sir Joshua which is one of the most pathetic episodes in the history of art. The relations of Gainsborough and Sir Joshua, of Gainsborough and the Academy, had always been somewhat strained. Gainsborough's treatment of both was cavalier, to say the least of it, and he was unreasonable in the matter of the hanging of his pictures. He had taken his honours as an academician as a matter of course, but discharged none of the duties of his position, and never attended to his colleagues' invitations ‘whether official or convivial.’ They had, not unnaturally, resented this neglect, and once passed a resolution to scratch his name from the list of their members, which was generously rescinded, without any improvement in the behaviour of Gainsborough. Sir Joshua had called upon him, but he neglected to return his visit. Sir Joshua had sat to him at his request, but Gainsborough had neglected to finish his portrait. On the other hand Reynolds had behaved well and even handsomely towards him, had bought his ‘Girl with Pigs,’ and paid, or obtained for him from M. de Calonne, forty guineas more than he asked for it. He now declared him, at a meeting of the Artists' Club, to be ‘the first landscape-painter in Europe,’ thereby drawing upon him the famous retort of Richard Wilson, that ‘Gainsborough was in his opinion the greatest portrait-painter at this time in Europe.’ On the other hand, Gainsborough had simply ignored Sir Joshua, but a few days before his death Reynolds tells us that Gainsborough wrote to him ‘to express his acknowledgments for the good opinion I entertained of his abilities, and the manner in which (he had been informed) I had always spoke of him; and desired he might see me once more before he died.’ The impression left by the interview upon Reynolds was ‘that his regret at leaving life was principally the regret of leaving his art; and more especially as he now began, he said, to see what his deficiencies were, which he said he flattered himself in his last works were in some measure supplied.’ ‘If any little jealousies had subsisted between us,’ his old rival says, ‘they were forgotten in those moments of sincerity, and the dying painter whispered to Reynolds, “We are all going to heaven, and Vandyck is of the party.”’
According to his wishes he was buried near his friend Kirby in Kew churchyard. His pall-bearers were Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sir William Chambers, Paul Sandby, West (afterwards Sir Benjamin), Bartolozzi, and Samuel Cotes. Sheridan was there as he had promised, and his nephew, Gainsborough Dupont, was chief mourner.
In the December after Gainsborough's death Sir Joshua Reynolds delivered his fourteenth discourse to the students of the Royal Academy, which was chiefly devoted to the genius of Gainsborough. It is a noble and generous tribute to his rival's memory, and, if we make allowances for the then prevalent views, remains still the most full and weighty analysis of his work which has ever been written.
In March 1789 an exhibition of the works remaining in his possession at his death was opened at Schomberg House, which was full of those landscapes and rustic pictures which he could not sell during his life, although they (with a few notable exceptions) have fetched far higher prices than his portraits since his death. A list of these works is given by Fulcher, as well as of the large collection of Gainsborough's paintings exhibited at the British Institution in 1814. A still larger gathering was at the Grosvenor Gallery in the winter of 1885.
No artist was ever at once more new, more natural, and more English. Whether in landscape or pastoral or portrait, he drew his inspiration entirely from his subject, and tinged it with his own sentiment. Some touch of Watteau's grace may have come to him through Gravelot. He may have applied himself, as Reynolds says, to the Dutch and Flemish masters, but what he learned from Rubens and Vandyck ‘he applied,’ as Reynolds also says, ‘to the originals of nature which he saw with his own eyes; and imitated not in the manner of those masters, but in his own.’ So he became the father of modern landscape, and of modern pastoral also, breaking away from the ‘classical’ traditions of Claude on the one hand, and the affected pastorals of Boucher and his school on the other. In portraits he was scarcely less original, painting his ladies and gentlemen in a manner entirely pure and unaffected, yet with such spirit, grace, and dignity as nature had endowed them with. He chose to represent them in their most quiet and unconscious moments with the ‘mind and
