[MUSIC] Gainsborough's portrait of Lord Ligonier which we will consider later, when I have gotten off the plane in California, is a remarkable portrait of a man with a favourite mare. Also remarkable for the close relationship, which Gainsborough evokes between man and beast. The measure of Gainsborough's success, as John Hayes has pointed out, may be gauged by his contemporaries remarks. Quote, it was possible to judge a Gainsborough portrait as though it were a living person. And in many of his canvases, we do have the sense that we are actually confronting someone as he or she actually looked at home or went about their daily business on the streets of Bath, where Gainsborough lived. End quote. We know also that Gainsborough strived to represent the emotions and, in part to the viewer, the compassion of his subject, human and animal, and their ability to express fine feelings. Gainsborough remarked in a letter to William Loather, one of his sitters, at the completion of his portrait, that he was sorry that his sons had not found favour with the picture. And that they were hoping to see “more brilliancy in the eyes”. But Gainsborough explained that, rather than seeking to make the eyes appear brilliant, he had aimed to convey in the eyes “tenderness and humanity, expressive of goodness”. The talent for representing the likeness of his human sitters, in so convincing a manner, was also a feature of the way Gainsborough was able to represent domestic animals. And especially the relationship between animals and their human companions. Which while clear in the work of many artists, is never quite so brilliantly achieved in numerous subtle ways, as in his remarkable pictures. Gainsborough's representations of animals, and of dogs in particular, is unusual in the tenderness of feeling that he's able to convey, and it no doubt reflects his own attitude to animals. He was a highly sensitive individual, and a non-conformist. Having been brought up in the low church, and no doubt influenced by the sermons that his own father read sometimes in their own church, Gainsborough took up the church's drive around the evolution of cruelty to animals in a determined way. It is important to remember that Gainsborough was painting in the late 18th century at a time when Cartesian theory was continuing to exert a strong influence. Gainsborough clearly belonged to those who opposed Descartes mechanistic views and who believed that animals too were intelligent, emotional beings. Gainsborough’s views were democratic or anti-anthropocentric towards the animal and the human kingdom. The 18th century gentleman was so often represented with his hound that it is tempting to read these joint portraits of men and dogs as simply symbolic of aristocratic masculinity. It is particularly marked in his wonderful portrait of Henry, 3rd duke of Buccleuch. This is a gorgeous portrait in which we see the duke dressed in a dark woollen jacket with a white ruffle on his sleeve, echoed in his lace cravat and wearing the insignia of his aristocratic family. He has both his arms around his fluffy hound. His hands clasped in a loving embrace. The dog sits up straight, staring directly out of the picture plane at the viewer. The duke's head inclines ever so slightly towards his dog in a loving gesture, and his eyes also meet those of the viewer. Michael Rosenthal and Martin Myrone, in their catalog of the 2003 Tate exhibition of Gainsborough's art, present a very useful discussion of what it meant in the 18th century, to be a man of sensibility. They begin with a newspaper quote of the meaning of the term sensibility. Quote, a lively and delicate feeling, a quick sense of the right and wrong, in all human actions. And other objects considered in every view of morality and taste. By the 1860s, the ideals of philosophers such as John Locke, Francis Hutcheson, and Adam Smith, had converged into what came to be known as the expression of sensibility in poetry, literature, and images. Sensibility was about the moral regulation of society during a period of great change, when industry, commerce, and the disruption of rural life threatened to upset stable civic society. The poor were naturally objects of attention from inner sensibility. And Gainsborough's interest in representing them in a compassionate way is part of his own striving for occupying the state himself. We will talk about this in more detail when we consider Gainsborough's cottage door in San Merino. 18th Century Britain and Rosenthal and Myrone explain, was thought to have attained a level of elegance and liberty to rival ancient times. Sensibility was a means to expressing one's moral sense in a culture of refinement. One of the hallmarks of a person of sensibility was an affinity with the natural world. In Gainsborough's representation of Saint George and the Duke of Buccleuch in an emotional relationship with their dogs, who were their affectionate companions increases our admiration for them in what might be called the epitome of refined sensibility. But let's now return to our portrait in more detail. What then did Gainsborough intend his viewer to apprehend when she or he viewed his painting? Does he successfully combine the potentially conflicting identities of the suitor as a military man, and a person of sensibility? Martin Myrone is not sure. He has uncovered more information about our soldier and recounts how in the opening volleys of the battle of Germantown, on the fourth of October 1777 Saint George was shot in the head. Taken from the field, and trepanned, leaving him with a large hole in the side of his skull. The wound was covered with a disfiguring silver plate, habitually covered by Saint George, with a black silk cap and it never healed. In her epistle to Colonel St George, written in April 1783, the writer Anna Seward noted, he now lives with a considerable part of his head shot away. And though feeble, emaciated, and in almost constant pain, his imagination and his virtues have lost nothing of their vigour. Unable to face the cold and damp conditions of Ireland or England, St. George regularly took extended tours to Europe neglecting his estates until his eventual return to Ireland in the 1790s. Myrone tells us that a fellow officer, Martin Hunter, left an extensive memoir. And the dramatic circumstances of his death in 1798 prompted biographic reminiscences on the part of a number of his acquaintances. Hunter suggests that Saint George was more interested in being wounded than doing the wounding. A tendency not wholly compatible with military duty, perhaps. But in keeping with what Myrone calls his Quixotism, the idea of Saint George as a quixotic figure was considered after he was murdered by Irish rebels on his estate in Cork in February 1798. The obituaries noted romance, his whole deportment and style of acting seemed formed by the ideas of chivalrous ages. His constant subjects were knights, halls, battlements, feats of arms, with stores of ladies. However we also know that he was very concerned about the fate of workers on his estate. And he set up various industries through which they might profit. Mansergh St. George was an active local magistrate, appalled by the poverty that he found on his estates in County Cork and County Galway. His response to this was his published account of the state of affairs in and about Headford, County Galway, in which he laments the condition of the Irish peasantry. And whilst considering establishing a linen industry on his estates to improve matters, he doubts the willingness or the ability of his tenants to make the enterprise work. Mansergh St George's wife died in 1791, leaving him a widower with two infant children. And he wished to have a portrait painted of himself as a monument to his grief for her. The eventual result of the commission is the full length portrait by Hugh Douglas Hamilton, now in the National Gallery of Ireland, in which Mansergh St. George in his Irish Light Horse militia uniform leans in an attitude of grief against a classical term inscribed non imamor. I rest my case. Was our officer of the Fourth Regiment of Foot, a man of feeling? What do you think? [MUSIC]
