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Gainsborough
by
The cheapest house they could find in Bath was fifty pounds a year. “Do you want to go to jail?” asked Mrs. Gainsborough of her husband when he proposed signing the lease. The worldly Thicknesse proposed that they should take this house at fifty pounds a year, or else take another at one hundred fifty at his expense. They decided to risk it at the rate of fifty pounds a year for a few months, and were duly settled.
Thicknesse was very proud of his art connections. He had but one theme–Gainsborough! People of note began to find their way to the studio of the painter-man in the Circus.
Gainsborough was gracious, handsome and healthy–fresh from the country. He met all nobility on a frank equality–God had made him a gentleman. His beautiful wife, now in her early thirties, was much sought in local society circles.
Everybody of note who came to Bath visited Gainsborough’s studio.
Garrick sat to him and played such pranks with his countenance that each time the artist looked up from his easel he saw a new man. “You have everybody’s face but your own,” said Gainsborough to Garrick, and dismissing the man he completed the picture from memory. This portrait and also pictures of General Honeywood, the Comedian Quin, Lady Grosvenor, the Duke of Argyle, besides several landscapes, were sent up to the Academy Exhibition at London.
George the Third saw them and sent word down that he wished Gainsborough lived in London, so he could sit to him.
The carrier, Wiltshire, who packed the pictures and took them up to London, had a passion for art that filled his heart, and he refused to accept gold, that base and common drudge ‘twixt man and man, for his services in an art way. And so Gainsborough presented him with a picture. In fact, during the term of years that Gainsborough lived at Bath, he gave Wiltshire, the modest driver of an express-cart, a dozen or more pictures and sketches. He gave him the finest picture he ever painted: that portrait of the old Parish Clerk. Gainsborough was not so good a judge of his own work as Wiltshire was. Wiltshire kept all the “Gainsboroughs” he could get, reveled in them during his long life, basked and bathed his soul in their beauty, and dying, bequeathed them to his children.
Had Wiltshire been moved by nothing but keen, cold, worldly wisdom– which he wasn’t–he could not have done better. Even friendship, love and beauty have their Rialto–the appraiser footed up the Wiltshire estate at more than fifty thousand pounds.
Gainsborough found himself with more work than he could very well care for, so he raised his prices for a “half-length” from five pounds to forty; and for a “full-length” from ten pounds to one hundred, in order to limit the number of his patrons. It doubled them. His promised picture of Thicknesse was relegated behind the door, and a check was sent the great man for five hundred pounds for his borrowed viola da gamba and other favors.
But Thicknesse was not to be bought off. He took charge of the studio, looked after the visitors, explaining this and that, telling how he had discovered the artist and rescued him from obscurity, giving scraps of his history, and presenting little impromptu lectures on art as he had found it.
The fussy Thicknesse used to be funny to Mr. and Mrs. Gainsborough, but now he had developed into a nuisance. To escape him, they resolved to turn the pretty compliment of King George into a genuine request. They packed up and moved to London.
The fifty pounds a year at Bath had seemed a great responsibility, but when Gainsborough took Schomberg House in Pall Mall at three hundred pounds, he boasts of his bargain. About this time “Scheming Jack” turns up asking for a small loan to perfect a promising scheme. The gracious brother replies that although his own expenses are more than a thousand pounds a year, he is glad to accommodate him, and hopes the scheme will prosper–which of course he knew it would not, for success is a matter of red corpuscle.