
The Letters of Thomas Gainsborough John Hayes
- Price: £25.00
- Add to Basket
Share this page:
- Series:
- The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
- Format:
- Paperback
- Publication date:
- 16 Feb 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780300223033
- Imprint:
- Yale University Press
- Dimensions:
- 240 pages: 235 x 156mm
- Illustrations:
- 80 b-w illus.
Categories:
Once described as “brilliant but eccentric . . . too licentious to be published,” Gainsborough’s letters delighted his friends and they delight us. This book gathers together all the known letters by the illustrious eighteenth-century British painter and connects them with a narrative of Gainsborough’s life that gives the correspondence a biographical coherence.
The letters reveal a man who was generous and warm-hearted, devoted to his family and friends, convivial, often dissipated yet modest and God-fearing, usually sensible in his own affairs and always so in the advice he gave to others. We also learn a great deal about Gainsborough’s painting: his methods and techniques, his attitude toward portraiture and landscape, his relationships with his patrons, the prices he charged, his concern about how his pictures were hung, and his ambivalence about the value of the Royal Academy exhibitions. Running through the letters, too, is his love of music and his friendship with musicians. The 110 letters, which include correspondence with Gainsborough’s friends and relatives, are supplemented by thirty-six documents in the artist’s own hand, chiefly instructions to his bankers and receipts for payments from clients. Illustrations are included of all the people to whom Gainsborough wrote whose portraits exist and of friends and works of art described in the letters. More than 300 notes identify these people and help to explain the text.
The letters reveal a man who was generous and warm-hearted, devoted to his family and friends, convivial, often dissipated yet modest and God-fearing, usually sensible in his own affairs and always so in the advice he gave to others. We also learn a great deal about Gainsborough’s painting: his methods and techniques, his attitude toward portraiture and landscape, his relationships with his patrons, the prices he charged, his concern about how his pictures were hung, and his ambivalence about the value of the Royal Academy exhibitions. Running through the letters, too, is his love of music and his friendship with musicians. The 110 letters, which include correspondence with Gainsborough’s friends and relatives, are supplemented by thirty-six documents in the artist’s own hand, chiefly instructions to his bankers and receipts for payments from clients. Illustrations are included of all the people to whom Gainsborough wrote whose portraits exist and of friends and works of art described in the letters. More than 300 notes identify these people and help to explain the text.
John Hayes, director of the National Portrait Gallery from 1974 to 1994, has written extensively on the art of Thomas Gainsborough.
-
Donald Judd:Metals - The Artist's Materials
Eleonora E. Nagy£30.00 -
William Blake - Visionary
Edina Adam£27.00 -
Finding Dora Maar
Brigitte Benkemoun£18.99 -
The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist
Kate Fullagar£32.00 -
Sidney Nolan - The Artist's Materials
Paul Dredge£30.00 -
Kathe Kollwitz - Prints, Process, Politics
Louis Marchesano£30.00 -
Gordon Bunshaft and SOM
Nicholas Adams£50.00 -
The Gauguin Atlas
Nienke Denekamp£16.99 -
Sounds
Wassily Kandinsky£18.99 -
Savage Tales
Linda Goddard£30.00 -
Mrs Delany
Clarissa Campbell Orr£30.00 -
A is for Archive
Matt Wrbican£30.00 -
Leonardo da Vinci Rediscovered
Carmen C. Bambach£400.00 -
Wright and New York
Anthony Alofsin£25.00 -
Manet and Modern Beauty - The Artist's Last Years
Scott Allan£50.00 -
Edvard Munch
Sue Prideaux£14.99 -
On Modern Beauty - Three Paintings by Manet, Gauguin, and Cezanne
Richard R. Brettell£14.99 -
Alfred Stieglitz
Phyllis Rose£16.99 -
Mondo Cane
Anne-Claire Schmitz£30.00 -
Owens, Laura
Scott Rothkopf£35.00
-
London's New Scene
Lisa Tickner£35.00 -
Early Irish Sculpture and the Art of the High Crosses
Roger A. Stalley£40.00 -
The Classical Body in Romantic Britain
Cora Gilroy-Ware£40.00 -
Christopher Wren
Vaughan Hart£45.00 -
Bernard Leach
Emmanuel Cooper£25.00 -
Aquatint Worlds
Douglas Fordham£45.00 -
Westminster Abbey
David Cannadine£35.00 -
Elizabethan Globalism
Matthew Dimmock£50.00 -
Artists’ Moving Image in Britain Since 1989
Erika Balsom£35.00 -
Witnessing Slavery
Sarah Thomas£45.00 -
Life in the Country House in Georgian Ireland
Patricia McCarthy£25.00 -
Inventing Boston
Edward Cooke£45.00 -
Gothic Sculpture
Paul Binski£40.00 -
Thomas Gainsborough
Hugh Belsey£150.00 -
Nicholas Hilliard
Elizabeth Goldring£40.00 -
Kensington Palace
Olivia Fryman£55.00 -
Hugh Lane
Morna O'Neill£40.00 -
John Singer Sargent
Richard Ormond£60.00 -
Apethorpe
Kathryn A. Morrison£60.00