On an early summer’s day in 1775, somewhere near Hammersmith, West London, highwaymen attacked a stagecoach and relieved the passengers inside of valuables.
We know the details because (through the efforts of a privately hired ‘thief-taker’) the highwaymen were tracked down, tried and hanged.
But it’s the passengers whose names stand out. Among them were three friends: the painter Thomas Gainsborough, and composers Johann Christian Bach and Carl Friedrich Abel. That this snapshot of history caught them travelling together was no accident, because they were often together – joined by a shared love of music that with Bach and Abel was professional but, in the case of Gainsborough, a deep-rooted amateur obsession.
One of the great portrait painters of the 18th century, Gainsborough nonetheless complained of being ‘sick of Portraits’, wishing ‘very much to take up my Viol da Gamba and walk off to some sweet Village where I can … enjoy the fag End of Life in quietness and ease’.
Had that happened, it wouldn’t just have been a single viola da gamba that he took with him to rural obscurity. He owned at least five. He called them ‘my comfort’. And over time, the comfort embraced a theorbo, violin and harp, growing to the dimensions of a small orchestra.
As another friend put it, there were occasions ‘when music seemed to be his employment and painting his diversion’. It’s only fitting, then, that this key ingredient in Gainsborough’s life gets due notice.
As another friend put it, there were occasions ‘when music seemed to be his employment and painting his diversion’. It’s only fitting, then, that this key ingredient in Gainsborough’s life gets due notice.
Gainsborough’s House in the small market town of Sudbury, Suffolk, where the painter spent his childhood, has recently reopened after an impressive refit, and now boasts a room devoted to his life with music. Furthermore, there’s a conspicuous focus on the music-making friends who gathered round him – usually with the result of finding themselves painted by the master.
Gainsborough’s portraits were turned out in quantity, and for the most part they depicted landed gentry with the wealth to pay for them – repeatedly shown sitting with a partner on a bench, under a tree, with an idealised rural scene behind them to suggest the breadth of their estates. But this repeating trope owes something to the cover illustrations he’d have known from printed song-sheets: typically these depicted couples on a bench, under a tree, in Vauxhall pleasure gardens.
Gainsborough got to know this sort of music as a young man growing up in Suffolk, where he spent a good deal of his time not at the easel but carousing with the Ipswich Music Club whose gatherings were evidently boisterous. As his daughter Margaret noted, being ‘passionately fond of music’ he was ‘much in company with musicians, with whom he often exceeded the bounds of temperance and his health suffered for it, being occasionally unable to work for a week after’.
Gainsborough painted a Hogarthian group portrait of this club – now lost – and also painted individual members like Joseph Gibbs, an Ipswich organist who must have also played the violin because Gainsborough depicts him with bound volumes of Corelli in the background – the picture is on loan to Gainsborough’s House from the National Portrait Gallery.
Gainsborough played the violin too, in what an erstwhile friend described as ‘the wild manner of one who never applied himself to learn’. In other words, he wasn’t good. But Mark Bills, the director of Gainsborough’s House, thinks this observation probably did Gainsborough an injustice, arguing that ‘It’s unlikely he would have spent so much time performing music and enjoying the experience if he genuinely was bad at it. And that musicians of stature were happy to play with him suggests the same.’
The stature of his musical acquaintances notably increased when he left Suffolk altogether and, in 1758, settled in Bath where he met the celebrated Linley family – led by a father, Thomas, who ran Bath’s Assembly Rooms and gave birth to an army of children with the apparent purpose of turning them into (highly profitable) performers.
They sang, played and sold tickets at the door – and enchanted the music historian Charles Burney who called them a ‘nest of nightingales’. A fair proportion of the Linley family sat for Gainsborough, giving rise to portraits that now hang together in Dulwich Picture Gallery.
But one that stands out is of Thomas Linley Jnr, widely thought of as ‘the English Mozart’. Born in 1756, the same year as the Salzburg Mozart, he was a child prodigy who went to Italy where, at the age of 14, he and Mozart met, becoming friends.
In later life he went on to compose an oratorio, The Song of Moses, as well as a collaborative stage-work, The Duenna, that Lord Byron judged ‘the best opera ever written’. But, alas, there wasn’t too much later life waiting for him. One of the what-ifs of English music history, he drowned, aged 22. Only the Gainsborough portrait of him, pale and interesting in a scarlet coat, survives to indicate what made him so remarkable.
That said, the star turn among Gainsborough’s Bath musician pictures has to be the dazzling 7ft, full-length magnificence of Ann Ford: arguably the finest in his output. Ann was famous as a dancer, instrumentalist and singer who lived dangerously – with a father who so disapproved of her professional career that he had her arrested for it. Notwithstanding this impediment, she went on to write a novel, turn down a lucrative offer to be the Earl of Jersey’s mistress, and fall foul of the French Revolution – narrowly escaping the guillotine by proving that, despite aristocratic grandeur, she earned a living by music.
Gainsborough was captivated by her, showing her in spirited but controversial terms with a guitar, a frock to die for, and a pair of jauntily crossed legs – which was considered shocking as a female pose. The social commentator Lady Westmorland summed up genteel reactions, finding it ‘a most extraordinary figure, handsome and bold; but I should be very sorry to have anyone I loved set forth in that manner’.
When Gainsborough made his final move, from Bath to London, he made ever grander musical friends, including Johann Christian Bach – son of JS Bach, tutor to Mozart and fellow-victim of that robbery in Hammersmith. An émigré from Germany, he’d settled in London where Gainsborough painted him in 1776 – another National Portrait Gallery picture on loan to Gainsborough’s House – with hands crossed, holding one of his own manuscripts, and sharing his father’s leanings toward the look of a bruiser in a powdered wig.
You can perhaps see why those highwaymen had chosen the wrong victim – as they also had in Carl Friedrich Abel, another German émigré who had come to London as a string-player in the court band of the German-born Queen Charlotte, wife of George III.
Gainsborough painted him more than once, writing equivocally of him on his death that ‘If Abel was not as great a man as Handel it was because caprice had ruined music before he ever took up the pen.’ And he was ultimately not a fan of yet another member of this Anglo-German circle, Johann Christian Fischer – though the portrait he produced of him is an undoubted masterpiece: a full-length 7ft, now in the Royal Collection, that shows Fischer in the act of composition, leaning thoughtfully against a keyboard. Fischer’s fame was largely as an oboist, commended by Burney as ‘most pleasing’ although less enthusiastically endorsed by Mozart who thought his playing ‘like a wretched pupil’ with a tone ‘entirely nasal’.
Whatever Fischer’s merits as a performer, Gainsborough took him into his house as a lodger, where Fischer proceeded to flirt with one of the painter’s daughters while marrying the other – a union that didn’t last and combined with a spot of fraud on Fischer’s part to terminate whatever friendship had previously existed.
But perhaps the most interesting of all Gainsborough’s musically related portraits was the one he made of Ignatius Sancho. Sancho had been born into slavery but rose through society to become a well connected man of letters and music, composing pieces that (as you can hear relayed at Gainsborough’s House on loop tapes) aren’t exactly works of genius but have competence and charm.
The portrait is among a tiny number in its time to focus on a person of black heritage and, what’s more, give the sitter dignity. With fine clothes. Like so many of the other pictures of musician-friends, it has distinctive qualities that stand in contrast to Gainsborough’s often more detached commercial work: there’s an ‘aliveness’ here beyond the doll-like poses he sometimes gave the landed gentry. And to see it is to understand why (in the language of the time as used in publications by the early Royal Academy), pictures like these were commonly referred to as ‘performances’. For a musician, that’s a telling word; and for a painter steeped in music, who collected instruments and fantasised about a better life spent in their company, it has peculiarly loaded power.
When Gainsborough painted, he performed. And when he shared his platform with the likes of Ann Ford, JC Bach, the Linleys, Abel, Fischer… the performance takes off, speaking down the centuries on virtuoso terms. Almost like something you can hear as well as see.
Thomas Gainsborough photo by Archiv Gerstenberg/ullstein bild via Getty Images