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The Painter's Daughters chasing a Butterfly

Catalogue entry

, 2000

Extracted from:
Judy Egerton, The British Paintings (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2000).

© The National Gallery, London

? c.

Oil on canvas, 113.5 × 105 cm (44¾ × 41¼ in.)

Provenance

Revd Robert Hingeston (1699–1766), Master of Ipswich School: unless given to him by Gainsborough, probably purchased at Gainsborough’s own sale before leaving Ipswich, 22–23 October 1759 (no cat.); then by descent1 through his son, Revd James Hingeston, Vicar of Reydon, near Southwold, Suffolk (d. 1777), to his grandson James Hingeston; Owen Roe, Ipswich, by 1856; Henry Vaughan, by 1871, by whom bequeathed to the National Gallery 1900.

Exhibited

BFAC , Old Masters, 1871 (72); RA Winter 1886 (48); Munich 1958 (63); NG , The Painter’s Daughters chasing a Butterfly: Painting in Focus No. 4, 1975 ; Tate Gallery 1980–1 (36, repr.); Paris, Grand Palais, 1981 (9); Tate Gallery 1987–8 (217); London ( NG ), Norwich and Newcastle 1997 (8).

Literature

Davies 1946, pp. 60–1; Fulcher 1856, pp. 48–9, 231; Waterhouse 1958, cat. no. 285, plate 52; Davies 1959, pp. 38–9; Michael Levey, The Painter’s Daughters chasing a Butterfly, exh. cat., NG , London 1975 (passim; n.p.); Hayes 1975, fig. 12 in colour, p. 207 n. 31; Belsey 1988, pp. 25–30, fig. 8; David Tyler, ‘Thomas Gainsborough’s Daughters’, Gainsborough’s House Society Annual Report 1991–2, Sudbury 1992, pp. 50–66.

Technical Notes

The ground is pinkish brown, clearly showing through Margaret’s dress, her apron and her outstretched foot, and also exposed in the space between Mary’s right arm and body and in her foot. This priming is a mixture of lead white, chalk (calcium carbonate) and orange ochre: the same constitution as in the lower priming layer in The Painter’s Daughters with a Cat (NG 3812).

Two samples of bright, slightly greenish yellow from the impasto of Mary’s dress were analysed: the pigment is pure Naples yellow (lead antimonate) in the strongest‐coloured areas, with lead white intermixed where the tint is paler.

The colour of the yellow in Mary’s dress is unusually good for an eighteenth‐century specimen. Naples yellow in eighteenth‐century pictures was often of a poor hue, traces of impurities (particularly iron) in its manufacture commonly giving it a distinctive orange (or sometimes pink) tinge; by the early nineteenth century improved methods of manufacture gave rise to much purer lead antimonate yellow pigments.

The mid‐ and light green of Margaret’s underskirt is made up of white lightly tinted with Prussian blue and a little black pigment (a pyrolised vegetable pigment, but not charcoal). The dull grey‐blue of the sky, upper left, is the same combination of pigments with more black, although a little vermilion is also incorporated rendering the paint both duller and denser.

The sombre greenish‐brown background above Mary’s head contains the usual complex combination of pigments Gainsborough employed for his duller‐coloured foliage paints: here it is Prussian blue, yellow, orange and red ochres, a little vermilion, red lake and possibly also a yellow lake. The paint surrounding the girl’s head appears to have been overthinned with diluent and has dried with the shrinkage cracks characteristic of this.

Discussion

The girls are Mary and Margaret, the artist’s daughters by his wife Margaret Burr, and their only children to survive infancy.2 Both daughters were born while Gainsborough was living and working in Sudbury, his own birthplace. Mary was baptised at All Saints, Sudbury, on 3 February 1750. Margaret was baptised at St Gregory’s, Sudbury, on 22 August 1751. In neither register of baptisms is the date of birth recorded, but if the Gainsboroughs followed the general custom of baptising their children within a month or so of birth, then Mary is likely to have been born in January 1750 and Margaret in July 1752. There was probably only eighteen months’ difference in age between them.

Mary’s and Margaret’s dates of baptism were established by David Tyler in 1992.3 Previously it had been inferred (from erroneous inscriptions on their shared tombstone in St Mary’s, Hanwell4) that Mary was born in 1748 and Margaret in 1752, with four years’ difference in age between them. Waterhouse in 1953 gave Mary’s dates as 1748 to 1826 and Margaret’s as 1752 to 1820; later writers accepted those birth dates and based their dating of Gainsborough's various portraits of his daughters upon them. It is much to the credit of Martin Davies, a confirmed bachelor, that he alone observed (when cataloguing the two National Gallery double portraits in 1959) that it is ‘hard to believe that there is about four years difference in age between the girls’.5

Between about 1756 and 1770, Gainsborough is known to have painted six double portraits of his daughters (listed below), as well as separate portraits of each of them.6 None of the double portraits is dated. Suggesting at least approximate dates for them must largely be based on estimating the girls’ probable ages in each picture from the dates of their baptisms. Other open‐air portraits painted at about the same time as the earlier double portraits of his daughters might be expected to help with dating but do not: not only are few of them dated or easily datable, but the decorous style of his commissioned portraits is different both in scale and manner to the freedom with which he portrays his daughters.

The Painter’s Daughters chasing a Butterfly is likely to have been painted in Ipswich in or about 1756. Mary, in yellow, appears to be about six years old, and Margaret about four or five. In Ipswich, where he lived for seven years (1752–9), Gainsborough rented a house opposite the Shire Hall; its garden adjoined that of the much larger house in Lower Brook [page 93][page 94]Street occupied by his friend the Master of Ipswich School, Revd Robert Hingeston.7 Both Hingeston and his wife sat to Gainsborough about 1756–98 for the small (30 × 25 in.) portraits he was then chiefly painting.

On 20 October 1759, before leaving Ipswich for Bath, Gainsborough put the following advertisement in the Ipswich Journal:To be Sold, Opposite the Shire Hall, Ipswich. On Monday and Tuesday next, the 22nd and 23rd inst. All the HOUSEHOLD GOODS OF MR. THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH, with some PICTURES and original DRAWINGS in the landskip way by his own hand, which, as he is desirous of leaving them among his friends, will have the lowest prices set upon them. The house to be let immediately…9Unless the painting of his daughters was a gift from Gainsborough to Hingeston, it is likely that Hingeston bought it in this sale, and for a low price; either way, he acquired the picture of two children whom he could often have observed playing in their garden.10

In the light of the recently traced baptismal dates of his daughters, NG 1811 is the only one of the double portraits of them likely to have been painted while Gainsborough was living and working in Ipswich. It is unfinished, though more worked up than the Self Portrait of 1754.11 By late 1759, the family had settled in Bath, where Gainsborough was to have a highly successful period as the portraitist of (chiefly) fashionable sitters; they remained in Bath until 1774. Three of the double portraits – depicting his daughters with a cat (NG 3812, pp. 98–101), as gleaners in the harvest field (fig. 2, of which only the half with Margaret’s portrait survives) and with beribboned flowers in their hair (fig. 1) – were probably painted not long after the Gainsboroughs’ move to Bath. These three (each also unfinished) may have been painted in fairly quick succession, perhaps when Gainsborough had more time on his hands than the rush of future commissions was to allow. The fifth double portrait (fig. 3) is some years later, but also within the Bath period. The last was probably painted after the move to London in 1774. Details of all these are given in the list below, though the order in which numbers 2, 3 and 4 were painted remains somewhat uncertain.

By far the most perceptive discussion of Gainsborough’s portraits of his daughters is to be found in Michael Levey’s The Painter’s Daughters chasing a Butterfly, written for the National Gallery’s Painting in Focus exhibition of 1975. As it cannot be matched, it will be extensively quoted from here. Levey makes the important point that before painting The Painter’s Daughters chasing a Butterfly, Gainsborough had probably ‘never tackled anything so ambitious as two figures full‐length and nearly life‐size’. Earlier figures portrayed in the open air, such as Mr and Mrs Andrews of about 1748–50 [page 95](NG 6301, pp. 80–7), Mr and Mrs John Gravenor and their Daughters12 of about 1752–4 and Heneage Lloyd and his Sister13 of the early to mid‐1750s are comparatively small in scale, somewhat doll‐like and limply articulated, and decorous in demeanour. Levey observes that by contrast, Mary and Margaret in pursuit of the butterfly are portrayed nearly life‐size, in entirely natural attitudes and with a new ‘boldness of conception’ which Gainsborough never thereafter lost. Painting his own children (Levey continues) gave Gainsborough the freedom to experiment, and gave him above all that ‘freedom in handling paint which is so much a part of the general air of freedom’ in this picture.14

Fig. 1

The Painter’s Two Daughters, c. 1760. Oil on canvas, 41 × 62 cm. London, Victoria and Albert Museum . © V&A Picture Library inv. F.9. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Fig. 2

Margaret Gainsborough Gleaning, c. 1760–1. Oil on canvas, 73 × 63 cm. Oxford, Ashmolean Museum . © Ashmolean Museum, Oxford WA1975.72. © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford

The tall flowering thistle on which the butterfly has come to rest is likely to have been based on a pencil or chalk study from nature, such as Gainsborough habitually made. Though no exactly corresponding study is now known, Levey reproduces a sheet of pencil studies which includes a comparable thistle. The butterfly is a large female ‘cabbage white’ (Pieris brassicae), one of the commonest English natives. But although Gainsborough suggests that it will fly away at the children’s approach, this butterfly could not in fact do so. Its wings, which in life would have been held vertically, have drooped and are unnaturally folded under the body. It has been pinched to death,15 instantly, by the skilled butterfly‐hunter’s manner of pinching the thorax between finger and thumb (as practised by Vladimir Nabokov, among others).16 The painter (not necessarily himself the killer) has then posed it upon a thistle. The representation of the children’s instinctive attempt to grasp the butterfly is, as Levey observes, ‘perhaps consciously weighted to possess some symbolic value. Childhood may be an enchanted state, but it does not last. Beyond the wood lies the world’:17 and the wood in Gainsborough’s picture is dark and sombre.

Levey observes that in the sequence of Gainsborough’s double portraits of his daughters, ‘their father always depicted them in contact fondly with each other, always linked physically by clasped hands, an outstretched arm, or through a half‐protective embrace.’18 Gainsborough’s fondness for his daughters, and his instinct that they would need each other’s support, is evident in his portraits of them, and also in his correspondence. He sometimes referred to them, jocularly enough, as ‘Molly & the Captain’.19 But he cannot have failed to be aware that as they grew up, Mary showed signs of mental instability, and Margaret of, at least, eccentricity. In 1771 he had called in various Bath doctors to diagnose Mary’s condition: some (including Dr Schomberg, see p. 102) pronounced it to be a ‘delirious fever’ which could be cured, but Dr Moysey probably more wisely opined that it was ‘a family complaint’.

Gainsborough’s fifth double portrait of his daughters as students of drawing (fig. 3) reveals his own hope that they could be trained to draw sufficiently well to earn money. Whitley refers to some works by ‘Miss Gainsborough’,20 but no work by either daughter is now known. The sixth and last known double portrait probably dates from the mid–1770s, before Mary’s marriage in 1780 to the celebrated composer and performer on the oboe Johann Christian Fischer (portrayed by Gainsborough in a brilliant full‐length of 178021). The marriage was unhappy, and brief; Mary then returned to her parents’ house. Margaret never married. After the death of Gainsborough in 1788 and of Mrs Gainsborough in 1798, the sisters spent the rest of their lives together.22 In 1818 an Ipswich friend described Margaret as ‘odd’ and Mary as ‘quite deranged’.23 Margaret died in 1820, and Mary in 1826.

The six double portraits:

  • (1) NG 1811, discussed above, is the earliest of the six known double portraits, each of which might be called ‘Portrait of the artist’s daughters’; the variant titles given below are in each case those given by the owners.
  • (2) The Painter’s Two Daughters (fig. 1): canvas (separated and later rejoined), 41 × 62 cm (27¹⁄₁₆ × 24½ in.), coll. V&A (F.9).25 In this Mary appears to be about ten years old, and Margaret about eight or nine, suggesting a date about 1760, not long after the Gainsborough family moved to Bath. Sometimes described as one sister tugging the other’s hair; but Mary (on the left) seems rather to be adjusting a hair‐ribbon or knot of flowers on the top of Margaret’s head.26
  • (3) The Painter’s Daughters with a Cat, painted about 1760–1; NG 3812, the subject of the next entry.
  • (4) Margaret Gainsborough Gleaning (fig. 2), painted about 1760–1; canvas, 73 × 63 cm (30 × 25 in.), coll. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (A.1076). This is the only surviving part of a double portrait described by W.H. Pyne in 1824 as ‘portraits of his [Gainsborough’s] two daughters, in the garb of peasant girls, on the confines of a corn‐field, dividing their gleanings. They appear to be of the age of about eight and nine, and are the size of life…’27
  • (5) Portrait of the Artist’s Daughters (fig. 3), painted about 1763–4; canvas, 127 × 101.6 cm (50⅛ × 40¹⁄₁₆ in.), coll. Worcester Art Museum, Mass. (1917.181).28 The girls may be portrayed in Gainsborough’s painting‐room – or an idealised version of it, with two statuettes, one of the Farnese Flora, the other unidentified, which Gainsborough may or may not have owned. Gainsborough’s friend Francis Hayman considered that to portray a sitter in a painting‐room gave an air of intimacy, and described one of his own portraits (Sir Edward Littleton, 1750): ‘The Background is suppos’d to be the inside of a Painters room, so there is a Statue, a Bust and some Canvas’s scatterd about.’29 But in this case there is also a practical element. Gainsborough hoped to make both his daughters sufficiently competent as artists to earn some money; he wrote to James Unwin from Bath, 1 March 1764, ‘I’m upon a scheme of learning them both to paint Landscape … that they may do something for Bread.’30 Mary, seated holding a porte‐crayon, with a portfolio of drawings on her lap, appears to be aged about sixteen; Margaret, standing behind her, holding a portfolio, appears to be about fourteen.
  • (6) The Artist’s Daughters, painted about 1775, canvas, 320 × 150 cm (91 × 59 in.), private collection.31 Mary appears to be about 25. In 1780 she was to embark on her brief, unhappy marriage to Johann Christian Fischer. This is the last known portrait of the two daughters together.
Fig. 3

Portrait of the Artist’s Daughters, c. 1763–4. Oil on canvas, 127 × 101.6 cm. Worcester, Massachusetts, Worcester Art Museum. © Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts, Museum Purchase Photo: Worcester Art Museum / Bridgeman Images

[page 97]

Notes

1. The Hingeston line of descent is elaborated here because it was confused by Fulcher 1856 (pp. 48–9), followed by Davies 1959 (p. 39) and by Einberg, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London 1987 (217). It was the Revd Robert Hingeston (not James) who was Gainsborough’s friend and sitter (see note 10). The compiler is indebted to John Bensusan‐Butt for a copy of his genealogical table of the Hingeston family. (Back to text.)

2. There is a strong probability that the 'Mary Gainsborough Hatton Garden’ who was buried on 1 March 1747 at St Andrew’s, Holborn, was the infant daughter of Thomas and Margaret Gainsborough. This record was first traced by Adrienne Corri, as noted by Hayes 1982, vol. I, p. 89 n. 5. The dates of birth and baptism of this Mary Gainsborough remain untraced. See David Tyler, ‘Thomas Gainsborough’s Days in Hatton Garden’, Gainsborough's House Review 1992–3, Sudbury 1993, pp. 27–32 (and n. 21). (Back to text.)

3. Tyler 1992, p. 50, and passim. (Back to text.)

4. The tomb still stands. Its lettering reads: ‘Sacred/to the Memory of/ MISS MARGARET GAINSBOROUGH/ who departed this life December/ 1820 in the 68th year of her Age/ Also MRS MARY FISCHER/ Sister to the above who died 2nd Day of July 1826/ Aged 78 Years [***] “and in their deaths they/ were not divided.” (Back to text.)

5. Davies 1959, p. 38. (Back to text.)

6. For Gainsborough’s single portraits of Mary and Margaret, see Waterhouse 1958, pp. 68–9, and Belsey 1988, passim. (Back to text.)

7. An advertisement in the Ipswich Journal after the Gainsboroughs’ departure describes the property as consisting of ‘a Hall, and two Parlours, a Kitchen, a Wash‐House, with a Garden and Stable, good Cellars, and well supply’d with Cock‐Water, five Chambers and Garrets, with other Conveniences’ (quoted by Whitley 1915, p. 25). The house no longer stands: its site is occupied by 34 Foundation Street. The Master’s House was in Lower Brook Street. See W.M.M., ‘From out the More Distant Past’, in Old Ipswichian Magazine, October 1961, pp. 68–70. (Back to text.)

8. W.370, 371. Revd Robert Hingeston’s portrait is repr. in colour in John Blatchly, The Town Library of Ipswich, Woodbridge 1989, facing p. 57. Blatchly notes that Hingeston was an Usher of Ipswich School 1721–43, and Master (i.e. Headmaster) 1743–66. He was thus an usher at the school when Gainsborough was a pupil there. (Back to text.)

9. Quoted by Whitley 1915, p. 22. (Back to text.)

10. Fulcher 1856, pp. 28–9, publishes a letter from Hingeston’s son (Revd James Hingeston) recalling his father’s friendship with Gainsborough and his ownership of several of Gainsborough’s works, including ‘a picture of Gainsborough’s two daughters … chasing a butterfly’, two portraits and several drawings. (Back to text.)

11. Private collection: W.290, plate 8: Belsey 1988, fig. 23. (Back to text.)

12. Coll. Yale Center for British Art, New Haven: see Malcolm Cormack, The Paintings of Thomas Gainsborough, Cambridge 1991, p. 52, repr. p. 53. (Back to text.)

13. Coll. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge: see Goodison 1977, pp. 80–1, plate 17: Hayes 1980, cat. no. 58, colour detail p. 91. Dated by Goodison to c. 1750, by Hayes to ‘early to mid 1750s’. (Back to text.)

14. Levey 1975 (p. 2). Two large fragments from an early double portrait were acquired separately by Gainsborough’s House in 1984 and 1991: the full‐length, nearly life‐size figure of a boy, in 1984, and the head and shoulders of a young girl, evidently painted on the same scale, in 1991. Hugh Belsey, curator of Gainsborough’s House, dates them to c. 1743–4. The fragments do not have the same ‘boldness of conception’ or ‘freedom in handling paint’ which Levey observes in NG 1811. (Back to text.)

15. These observations were made by Canon Peter Hawker, FSA and entomologist, in an undated letter to the Tate Gallery while the picture was on loan to the Gainsborough exhibition, 1980–1. (Back to text.)

16. See Brian Boyd, Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years, London 1992, p. 121. (Back to text.)

17. Levey 1975 [p. 1]. (Back to text.)

18. Ibid. (Back to text.)

19. In letters to James Unwin, 24 July 1763; c. 1764; and 21 January 1765; see Woodall 1961, pp. 147, 157, 163. (Back to text.)

20. Whitley 1915, p. 352: ‘In early catalogues of picture sales landscapes by Miss Gainsborough are occasionally mentioned’; but none is recorded in the Getty Provenance Index 1801–10. (Back to text.)

21. Millar 1969, cat. no. 800, plate 79. (Back to text.)

22. For the later years of the Gainsborough sisters, see Tyler 1992, pp. 50–60; and David Tyler, ‘The Gainsborough family: births, marriages and deaths re‐examined', in Gainsborough’s House Review 1992–3, Sudbury 1993, pp. 45–8. (Back to text.)

23. Quoted by Tyler 1992, p. 55. (Back to text.)

24. Purchased as a double portrait by Charles William Macready and John Forster, jointly, some time after 1831, then cut vertically into two; the two halves were later rather imperfectly reunited by Forster, who bequeathed the painting to the V&A in 1876. (Back to text.)

25. W.284, plate 50; Levey 1975, fig. 6; Belsey 1988, fig. 9. (Back to text.)

26. See ‘M.W.T.’ in anon., 100 Great Paintings in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London 1985, p. 70, repr. in colour p. 71: Belsey 1988, p. 27, repr. fig. 9. (Back to text.)

27. W.283; Belsey 1988, p. 87, quoting Pyne’s review in the Somerset House Gazette, 7 August 1824, repr. in colour p. 19. (Back to text.)

28. W.287, plate 90; Belsey 1988, pp. 88–91, repr. in colour p. 89. See St. John Gore, in [ed. anon.] European Paintings in the Collection of the Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Mass. 1974, pp. 30–3. A chalk study for this painting (Hayes 1970, cat. no. 25, plate 90; Belsey 1988, cat. no. 21, repr.) was acquired by Gainsborough’s House in 1996. (Back to text.)

29. Quoted by Allen 1987, p. 100. (Back to text.)

30. Woodall 1963, p. 151. (Back to text.)

31. W.288; Belsey 1988, repr. p. 30, fig.ll. (Back to text.)

Abbreviations

BFAC
Burlington Fine Arts Club
NG
National Gallery, London
RA
Royal Academy of Arts, London; Royal Academician
RA, Winter
Exhibitions presented at the Royal Academy during the winter months (and from 1871 to 1910 usually entitled Works by the Old Masters and by Deceased Artists of the British School), as distinct from the Summer exhibitions of works by living artists and their contemporaries
V&A
Victoria and Albert Museum, London

List of references cited

Allen 1987
AllenBrianFrancis Hayman (exh. cat. Kenwood, London 1987 includes Checklist of paintings, drawings, book illustrations and prints, pp. 171–93), New Haven and London 1987
Anon. 1974
Anon., ed., European Paintings in the Collection of the Worcester Art MuseumWorcester, Mass. 1974
Anon. 1985
Anon., 100 Great Paintings in the Victoria and Albert MuseumLondon 1985
Belsey 1988
BelseyHughGainsborough’s Family (exh. cat.), Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury 1988
Blatchly 1989
BlatchlyJohnThe Town Library of IpswichWoodbridge 1989
Boyd 1992
BoydBrianVladimir Nabokov: The American YearsLondon 1992
Cormack 1991
CormackMalcolmThe Paintings of Thomas GainsboroughCambridge 1991
Davies 1946a
DaviesMartinNational Gallery Catalogues: The British SchoolLondon 1946 (revised edn, London 1959)
Davies 1959
DaviesMartinNational Gallery Catalogues: The British School, revised edn, London 1959
Einberg 1987
EinbergElizabethManners and Morals: Hogarth and British Painting 1700–1760 (exh. cat. Tate Gallery, London), London 1987
Fredericksen 1988–96
FredericksenBurton, ed., assisted by Julia I. Armstrong and Doris A. MendenhallThe Index of Paintings Sold in the British Isles during the Nineteenth Century (I (1801–5), Santa Barbara 1988; II (1806–10), 2 vols, Santa Barbara 1990; III (1811–15), 2 vols, Munich, London, New York and Paris 1993; IV (1816–20), 2 vols, Santa Monica 1996 (revised versions of these volumes can be consulted online)), 4 vols (10 parts)OxfordSanta BarbaraMunichLondonNew YorkParis and Santa Monica 1988–96
Fulcher 1856
FulcherGeorge WilliamsLife of Thomas Gainsborough, R.A.London 1856 (2nd revised edn, also dated 1856)
Goodison 1977
GoodisonJ. W.Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge Catalogue of Paintings: Volume 3, British SchoolCambridge 1977
Hayes 1970
HayesJohnThe Drawings of Thomas Gainsborough2 volsLondon 1970
Hayes 1975
HayesJohnGainsboroughLondon 1975
Hayes 1980
HayesJohnThomas Gainsborough (exh. cat. London, Tate Gallery, 1980-81), London 1980
Hayes 1982
HayesJohnThe Landscape Paintings of Thomas Gainsborough (I: Critical Text; II: Catalogue Raisonné), 2 volsLondon 1982
Levey 1975
LeveyMichaelThe Painter’s Daughters chasing a Butterfly: National Gallery Painting in Focus (exh. cat. National Gallery, London), London 1975
Millar 1969
MillarOliverThe Later Georgian Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen2 volsLondon 1969
Pyne 1824
PyneW.H., ‘Review’, Somerset House Gazette, 7 August 1824
Tyler 1992
TylerDavid, ‘Thomas Gainsborough’s Daughters’, Gainsborough’s House Society Annual Report 1991–2Sudbury 1992, 50–66
Tyler 1993a
TylerDavid, ‘Thomas Gainsborough’s days in Hatton Garden’, Gainsborough's House Review, 1992–3, 27–32
Tyler 1993b
TylerDavid, ‘The Gainsborough family: births, marriages and deaths re‐examined’, Gainsborough's House Review, 1992–3, 45–8
Waterhouse 1958
WaterhouseEllis K.GainsboroughLondon 1958 (reprinted, 1966)
Whitley 1915
WhitleyWilliam T.Thomas GainsboroughLondon 1915
W.M.M. 1961
W.M.M., ‘From out the More Distant Past’, Old Ipswichian Magazine, October 1961, 68–70
Woodall 1961
WoodallMary, ed., The Letters of Thomas Gainsborough, 1961
Woodall 1963
WoodallMary, ed., The Letters of Thomas Gainsborough, 2nd edn, London 1963

List of exhibitions cited

London, Burlington Fine Arts Club 1871
London, Burlington Fine Arts Club, Old Masters, 1871
London 1886
London, Royal Academy, Works by the Old Masters and by Deceased Artists of the British School, 1886
London, National Gallery, The Painter’s Daughters chasing a Butterfly: Painting in Focus No. 4, 1975
London 1987–8
London, Tate Gallery, Manners & Morals: Hogarth and British Painting 1700–1760, 15 October 1987–3 January 1988 (exh. cat.: Einberg 1987)
London, Norwich and Newcastle‐upon‐Tyne 1997
London, National Gallery; Norwich, Castle Museum; Newcastle‐upon‐Tyne, Laing Art Gallery, Young Gainsborough, 1997
London and Paris 1980–1
London, Tate Gallery; Paris, Grand Palais du Louvre, Gainsborough, 8 October 1980–4 January 1981, 6 February–27 April 1981; with some changes (exh. cat.: Hayes 1980)
Munich 1958
Munich, Residenz, The Age of Rococo: Art and Culture of the Eighteenth Century, 15 June–15 September 1958
Paris 1981
Paris, Grand Palais, 1981
Arrangement of the Catalogue

This is a catalogue of the 61 works which represent the British School in the National Gallery now, at the beginning of 1998. The first Descriptive Catalogue of the Pictures in the National Gallery, with Critical Remarks on their Merits, by W. Young Ottley, was published in 1832 (earlier catalogues were hardly more than hand‐lists). The first scholarly catalogue devoted to the Gallery’s British pictures – National Gallery Catalogues: The British School – was compiled by Martin Davies (Director 1968–73). Its first edition in 1946 included 333 pictures. By 1959, when Davies published a revised edition (following large transfers of pictures upon the Tate’s separation in 1954 from the National Gallery in 1954), the number of British pictures in the National Gallery had been reduced to 99.

Martin Davies’s British School catalogue still stands as a model of concise record and meticulous (sometimes astringent) footnotes. This catalogue is chattier. I have tried to combine accurate information about the making and subsequent history of the pictures with more concern for their subject matter than Martin Davies allowed himself. Here I share to the full Neil MacGregor’s conviction that the public should have as much information as possible about their pictures. In a collection still dominated by portraits, much information about sitters (men, women and, in the largest portrait of all, a horse) is available; some of it may help to assess how far a portraitist has succeeded in reflecting [page 17]individual character. The background information offered here can, of course, be skipped, leaving the illustrations – or better still, the actual works – to speak for themselves.

All the works have been examined in the company of Martin Wyld, the Gallery’s Chief Restorer. He has compiled all the Technical Notes except for those on Hogarth’s Marriage A‐la‐Mode, which have been contributed by David Bomford. Many of these Technical Notes incorporate the results of detailed examination by Ashok Roy, Head of the Scientific Department, and by his colleagues Raymond White and Jennie Pilc. The bibliography of published work on the techniques and pigments used by artists during the period covered by this catalogue (pp. 432–5) has been compiled by Jo Kirby of the Gallery’s Scientific Department.

The catalogue is arranged in the two parts into which it fairly naturally falls. Part I catalogues the well‐known and deservedly popular works which are nearly always on view (except when lent to outside exhibitions). The artists represented in it are Constable, Gainsborough, Hogarth, Thomas Jones, Lawrence, Reynolds, Sargent, Stubbs, Turner, Wilson, Wright of Derby and Zoffany, arranged in alphabetical order, with their works (when more than one) in their known (or likely) chronological sequence. The time‐span of works by this small group of twelve artists is hardly more than 150 years, from Hogarth’s six paintings of Marriage A‐la‐Mode, of about 1742, to Sargent’s Lord Ribblesdale, dated 1902. In this part of the catalogue, movements of pictures to and from the Tate are briefly noted (below the heading Exhibited), such information being offered to reassure those who remember seeing, say, Wright of Derby’s An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump in the Tate rather than in the National Gallery (or recalling locations given in past literature) that their recollection was not at fault. Under this heading, movements for short periods usually indicate loans supplied by the Tate to fill gaps on the National Gallery walls when it lent pictures for exhibition elsewhere. ‘Tate 1960–1’, frequently noted, indicates the period of the Gallery’s winter exhibition National Gallery Acquisitions 1953–62 ; to make room for this exhibition, most of its British School pictures were accommodated and displayed in the Tate Gallery.

Part II catalogues the Gallery’s collection of portraits (including four marble busts) of those who played significant parts in the history of the National Gallery itself. Since it is in a sense a narrative (though an incomplete one) of the Gallery’s history, Part II is presented chronologically, according to the various sitters’ relationships to the National Gallery. Lawrence is the only artist to appear in both parts of this catalogue (his portrait of *Queen Charlotte appears in Part I, his two portraits of *John Julius Angerstein in Part II). In this group, Sir George Beaumont (grudgingly sitting to Hoppner, an artist he habitually denigrated) will be a familiar figure in the history of British art. Other Trustees and benefactors – preeminently, perhaps, Layard of Nineveh – will be better known outside the perspectives of the National Gallery, while two of its minor heroes – William Seguier, the Gallery’s first Keeper, and William Boxall RA , its second Director – may hardly be known at all.

Few portraits of National Gallery benefactors were ever transferred to the Tate; the only exceptions appear to be the transfer of the first version of Linnell’s portrait of Samuel Rogers (the National Gallery retaining a second version) and the transfer in 1949 of Hoppner’s portrait of Charles Long, Lord Farnborough, accepted by the National Gallery as a gift in 1934, but hung for a few months only, before being pronounced by Sir Kenneth Clark (Director, 1933–45) ‘not worth a place’. The National Gallery retains a finer image of Long in the form of Chantrey’s marble bust. Most of the works in Part II are hung in the Reception Area or the Reserve Collection.

All but one of the benefactors who figure in Part II have one thing in common: they bought pictures, but begat no heirs, and therefore chose to give or bequeath paintings to the National Gallery. The exception is the actor‐manager Thomas Denison Lewis, who in 1849 bequeathed not only *Mr Lewis as The Marquis in the Midnight Hour (Shee’s portrait of his famous actor‐father), but also £10,000 for future Gallery purchases. Prudently invested, the Lewis Fund enabled the purchase of many National Gallery pictures of all schools, including two much‐loved British pictures: the Heads of Six of Hogarth’s Servants and Gainsborough’s *Cornard Wood. The Hogarth was transferred to the Tate in 1960: thus, unknowingly, Lewis became a benefactor to both institutions.

Ann An Appendix includes provisional catalogue entries for *Portrait of a Lady, painted by Cornelius Johnson (or Jonson van Ceulen) after his return to Holland, and *On the Delaware, by the wholly American painter George Inness. Both were included in Martin Davies’s British School catalogue, but since they do not properly belong to the British School, they will eventually be included in more appropriate Schools catalogues.

About this version

Version 1, generated from files JE_2000__16.xml dated 14/10/2024 and database__16.xml dated 16/10/2024 using stylesheet 16_teiToHtml_externalDb.xsl dated 14/10/2024. Structural mark-up applied to skeleton document in full; entry for NG524, biography for Turner and associated front and back matter (marked up in pilot project) reintegrated into main document; document updated to use external database of archival and bibliographic references; entries for NG1207, NG130, NG925, NG6301, NG1811, NG6209, NG113-NG118, NG1162, NG6544, NG4257, NG681, NG3044, NG6569, NG538, NG6196-NG6197 and NG725 proofread and prepared for publication; entries for NG113-NG118, NG1207, NG1811, NG4257, NG524, NG538, NG6209, NG6301, NG6569 and NG725 proofread following mark-up and corrected.

Cite this entry

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https://data.ng.ac.uk/0878-000B-0000-0000
Permalink (latest version)
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Chicago style
Egerton, Judy. "NG 1811, The Painter’s Daughters chasing a Butterfly". 2000, online version 1, October 17, 2024. https://data.ng.ac.uk/0878-000B-0000-0000.
Harvard style
Egerton, Judy (2000) NG 1811, The Painter’s Daughters chasing a Butterfly. Online version 1, London: National Gallery, 2024. Available at: https://data.ng.ac.uk/0878-000B-0000-0000 (Accessed: 11 November 2024).
MHRA style
Egerton, Judy, NG 1811, The Painter’s Daughters chasing a Butterfly (National Gallery, 2000; online version 1, 2024) <https://data.ng.ac.uk/0878-000B-0000-0000> [accessed: 11 November 2024]