Thomas Gainsborough ra 1727–1788
NG 6301 
Mr and Mrs Andrews

Judy Egerton, 2000

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

c. 1750

Oil on canvas, 69.8 × 119.4 cm (27½ × 47 in.)

Provenance

By descent from the sitters to their eldest son, Revd Charles Andrews (1755–1823), Rector of Henny and Flempton, and then by virtually uninterrupted¹ descent in the Andrews family to Gerald Willoughby Andrews (b. 1896, a great‐great‐great‐grandson of the sitters), by whom sold Sotheby’s 23 March 1960 (59), bt Agnew’s, from whom purchased by the National Gallery, with a Special Grant from the Exchequer, grants from the Pilgrim Trust and the National Art Collections Fund, and contributions from Associated Television Ltd and Mr and Mrs W. W. Spooner, 1960.

Exhibited

Ipswich 1927 (26); Brussels, Musée Moderne, Peinture Anglaise, XVIIIe et XIXe Siècles, 1929 (63); London, 25 Park Lane, 1930 (145); RA 1934 (265); Manchester City Art Gallery, British Art, 1934 (19); London, 45 Park Lane, 1936 (93); Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Twee Eeuwen Engelsche Kunst, 1936 (38); Paris, Louvre, 1938 (46); London, 39 Grosvenor Square, British Country Life through the Centuries, 1937 (277); Norwich Castle Museum, Portraits in the Landscape Park from Norfolk and Suffolk Houses, 1720–1800, 1948 (16); British Council tour 1949–50 (44); London, South Bank, Festival of Britain, 1951 ; Paris, one of four paintings selected to represent British Art in the ‘Lion and Unicorn Pavilion’, 1953 (43); Tate Gallery 1953 (5); Texas, Fort Worth Art Centre, Inaugural Exhibition, 1954 (53); Rotterdam [? and Brussels], 1955 (31); Sudbury, Town Hall, Our Heritage: Gainsborough’s House Appeal, 1958 ; Montreal Museum of Fine Art, Expo 67: Man and his World, 1967 (68); Paris, Grand Palais, 1981 (4); Madrid, Museo del Prado, Pintura Británica de Hogarth a Turner, 1988–9 (24); NPG , The Portrait in British Art: Paintings bought with the help of the National Art Collections Fund, 1991–2 (21); London ( NG ), Norwich and Newcastle 1997 (28).

Literature

Armstrong 1904, p. 257; Roger Fry, Reflections on British Painting, London 1934, p. 69; Sitwell 1936, pp. 67–9; R.W. Ketton‐Cremer, ‘Portraits in the Landscape Park’, The Listener, 9 September 1948, p. 388; Fry 1951, p. 165; Waterhouse 1953, p. 184; Waterhouse 1958, cat. no. 18, pp. 17, 52; Hayes 1975, pp. 41, 203; Hayes 1982,1, pp. 67–9; Potterton 1976, pp. 9,12–13; Hugh Prince, ‘Art and the agrarian revolution, 1710–1815’, in Space and History, Proceedings of the Scopelos Symposium, Thessaloniki, 1989, pp. 134, 140; Shawe‐Taylor 1990, pp. 128–30.

Technical Notes

In good condition. Cleaned shortly before acquisition in 1960. There are some changes in the branches of the large tree above and to the (viewer’s) right of Mrs Andrews.

The ground is a light greyish cream containing lead white and calcium carbonate (chalk), very similar, for example, to that used for Dr Ralph Schomberg (NG 684).

The greyest areas of sky contain no blue pigment, only wood charcoal combined with white (a mixture that has a distinctly bluish cast), also similar to the grey sections of sky in Dr Ralph Schomberg. This technique for stormy skies is fairly common in Dutch seventeenth‐century landscape painting. Small amounts of Prussian blue occur in the bluer areas of the sky in Mr and Mrs Andrews.

The paint of Mrs Andrews’s dress comprises a lightly tinted body colour of Prussian blue with white, and a deeper tone, richer in Prussian blue, for the shadows. There may well have been a degree of fading of the colour here.

The dull grey‐green of the landscape, to the left, contains Gainsborough’s usual complicated mixture of pigment for his green paints: Prussian blue, yellow lake, earth pigments, Naples yellow, white and black. Similarly, the dark green of the bench on which Mrs Andrews sits has this constitution, but lacks Naples yellow.

The pale to mid‐yellow of the cornfield is identified as Naples yellow (lead antimonate) with white.

Discussion

The picture remained with the sitters’ descendants in Suffolk for over two centuries, and was largely unknown until 1927, when Mr George Andrews lent it to the Gainsborough Bicentenary exhibition at Ipswich. After that, it was constantly in demand for exhibitions. Its charm and its native ‘Englishness’ can hardly be captured in words, though they have inspired far more attempts than can be listed here under Literature. Perhaps Ellis Waterhouse came closest to defining the picture’s singularity when he observed in 1953 that ‘There is a dewy freshness about this picture, a friendly naturalness of vision of an artist yet untainted by any preoccupation with fashionable taste, which makes it one of the eccentric masterpieces of English painting.’

The sitters are Robert Andrews and his wife Frances, whose marriage took place in the parish church of All Saints, Sudbury, on 10 November 1748.² Robert Andrews was born on 30 November 1725,³ the son of Robert Andrews, gentleman, of Bulmer, and his third wife Martha Brewster.⁴ Bulmer, his birthplace, is two miles south‐west of Sudbury, Gainsborough’s birthplace; Bulmer is on the Essex side of the River Stour which at that point serves as the county boundary, Sudbury on the Suffolk side.⁵ Robert Andrews and Gainsborough are each said to have attended Sudbury Grammar School,⁶ their paths diverging when Gainsborough left school in about 1742 to train as an artist in London. Robert Andrews proceeded to Oxford (University College) in 1744.⁷ but does not appear to have taken a degree. Most of his energies were to be devoted to farming and improving his land.

Frances Carter, born in or about 1732, was brought up in Ballingdon,⁸ a hamlet in the parish of Bulmer. When [page 81][page 82]Robert Andrews married her, he was marrying not quite the girl next door, but probably the nearest marriageable girl of his own class. Gainsborough had already (probably in 1747) painted a double portrait of Frances Carter’s parents,⁹ Mr and Mrs William Carter (fig. 2),¹⁰ which must be of roughly the same date as his Portrait of the Artist with his Wife and Daughter (NG 6547, pp. 64–71); both were probably painted in London, before Gainsborough’s return to Sudbury. William Carter, a wealthy cloth merchant, owned a share of a house in the City of London, as well as Ballingdon Hall, where his daughter Frances was born, and ‘a string of Essex properties’.¹¹ If Gainsborough’s double portrait of Frances Carter’s parents is to be believed, Mr Carter was a very large man, and his wife (Frances Jamineau, born ?1703, of French parentage) either tiny or anorexic; insufficient sittings may be largely to blame for this disproportion, though stranger matings have occurred in reality. Gainsborough adapts the same blue dress that appears in the Portrait of the Artist with his Wife and Daughter (and reappears again, as noted below) in Mr and Mrs Gravenor and their Daughters (see p. 67, fig. 2). Mr and Mrs Carter sit on a rococo garden seat which anticipates the one in Mr and Mrs Andrews, but the setting for their portrait is artificial woodland rather than the landscape of nature which Mr and Mrs Andrews inhabit.

William Carter’s properties in Essex included a moiety or half‐share of an estate outside Bulmer called Auberies.¹² The other half‐share had been purchased by Robert Andrews’s father; when he died in 1735, Robert Andrews (then a minor) inherited his half‐share. Probably the two fathers had planned the marriage between their children, who may have had not much more say in it than the young couple in Marriage A‐la‐Mode. When Robert Andrews married Frances Carter, her father’s half‐share was promised to him as a bequest. William Carter died two weeks after the young people’s marriage; when probate of his estate was granted in 1750, his half‐share came to Robert Andrews.¹³ Thus Robert Andrews acquired sole possession of Auberies and the estate in 1750. It may well have been this which prompted him to ask Gainsborough to paint what is usually referred to as a ‘double portrait’ of himself and his wife. But it might equally be called a triple portrait – of Robert Andrews, his wife and his property.

The house to which Robert Andrews brought his sixteen‐year‐old bride in 1748 is just out of the picture (behind the spectator, and to his right); but it deserves mention. One could hardly have picked a more suitable house for Mr and Mrs Andrews than the ‘Regular, Substantial and Convenient Brick‐Built Mansion’ called Auberies (fig. 1), with its neat porch and delicately gabled top storey window, its gazebos and its walled garden.¹⁴ The etching of Auberies the Seat of Rob^t Andrews Esq^r in the Parish of Bulmer was published in 1769 in A History of Essex, by A Gentleman’, who informs us that Auberies is ‘the most capital mansion in the parish’, that it is ‘is situate upon an eminence, about a mile from Sudbury’ and commands ‘a most delightful prospect’.¹⁵ In fact, as Hugh Belsey notes, Auberies is situated ‘on what by East Anglian standards is a steep hill’;¹⁶ while it does indeed command fine views, it is also exposed to the winds, and in the nineteenth century was considered to be such a cold house that it was often tenantless.¹⁷

It is often supposed that this is a ‘marriage portrait’, a concept (never defined outside dynastic circles) which presupposes some formality and some immediacy, if not necessarily the speed and snap of our wedding photographs. But Gainsborough’s portrait is unlikely to have been painted before 1750, and may well, as already proposed, commemorate the consolidation of the Auberies estate as well as the union of the couple; in any case, Gainsborough was probably [page 83]still in London when the marriage took place, returning to Sudbury in late 1748 or early 1749.¹⁸ Neither Mr or Mrs Andrews is dressed with the formality which might be expected in a marriage portrait. Robert Andrews has certainly not dressed up for a portraitist whom he has known since his school days. He has ambled into the picture in his habitual baggy shooting jacket – Sacheverell Sitwell notes ‘the loose, flapping lapels of his coat, the wrinkles of his sleeves and waistcoat, his gloves creasing at his wrist, and the twisted bags of powder and shot that dangle from his pocket’.¹⁹ He wears it nonchalantly; but it is above all its colour – primrose buff, with a crumpled apple‐green velvet collar – that contributes more than any other single element to the lightness and informality of the whole picture. If Mr Andrews had been portrayed in the blue‐black frock coat worn by all the other men in Gainsborough’s early conversation pieces (including the artist himself), much would have been lost. As it is, he is suited to his own element, with his very long‐barrelled gun under his arm, and his well‐trained retriever wondering why he doesn’t get on with taking a pot at a hare or a partridge. Robert Andrews appears to be of much the same temperament as his Suffolk neighbour Major John Dade, portrayed by Gainsborough in shooting dress whose colouring is equally in tune with that of the landscape he inhabits, and with a game‐bird at his feet (fig. 3).

Mrs Andrews, still only seventeen or eighteen years old in 1750, is less self‐confident, sitting bolt upright in the lightest and clearest blue of all the blue dresses in which Gainsborough liked at this period to paint his women (including Mrs Gainsborough, Mrs Kirby and Mrs Gravenor).²⁰ The fall of light on the folds of her dress is so ravishingly painted that it seems mundane to observe that it is not in fact a dress but a skirt and jacket, both constituting an informal or ‘undress’ style.²¹ The informality of her attire is still further emphasised by the fact that she is wearing not shoes but backless mules, such as one might potter about the house in.

Mrs Andrews sits on a garden seat of deliciously serpentine rococo design; predating cast iron, it could only have been made of wood, and indeed its swirled and splayed foot seems almost to merge with the roots of the oak tree beside it. Furniture‐makers of 1750 were skilled enough to execute such a design, but in this case were probably not asked to. As Desmond Fitz‐Gerald suggests, this ‘exquisitely conceived’ piece of garden furniture is likely to be Gainsborough’s invention, inspired by his master Gravelot’s rococo designs.²² For ‘elegance and verve’, this seat surpasses those on which he had portrayed (or was to portray) the Carters, the ‘Lady and Gentleman in a Park’ or the Gravenors. Perhaps one of these couples had had a rather avant‐garde seat sent down from London, inspiring Gainsborough to elaborate others to suit various sitters’ poses.

Mr and Mrs Andrews pose for Gainsborough under an oak tree which still stands, though it is now dead. A hole about seven feet up its trunk is evidence of the loss of the branch which once spread above them. Behind them is a wide view looking south over the valley of the Stour. Waterhouse famously observed that ‘In this picture, for the first time, the old tradition of the “conversation piece” becomes transmuted in the hands of an artist for whom the portrait and the landscape are both of equal interest.’²³ And this landscape is depicted with more accuracy than any other landscape by Gainsborough. Though the valley is now more wooded, it is otherwise little changed; the curved line on the right, emphasised by sheaves of wheat in the foreground and continuing over a dip in the land, is still followed as the demarcation between the house’s park and its arable lands.²⁴

By 1750, Robert Andrews’s holdings of land consisted of nearly 3000 acres.²⁵ Much of the land we see belonged to him. Potterton aptly quotes from one of Joseph Addison’s essays in the Spectator, 1712, in which Addison observes that ‘A man might make a pretty landscape of his own possessions’.²⁶ Whether or not Robert Andrews had read Addison, this is evidently just what he hopes Gainsborough will do for him. It seems likely that Robert Andrews was a stickler in insisting that Gainsborough should be accurate over every detail. This is after all the landscape both men had known all their lives. There are glimpses of two churches: on the left is a distant view of the square tower of Holy Trinity Church, Long Melford,²⁷ some three miles from the sitters’ house; in the centre Gainsborough has ‘parted the trees’²⁸ for a view of the parish church of All Saints, Sudbury, no more than two miles away, where the couple had been married in 1748.²⁹ Further to the right there is a glimpse of the barns of the home farm at Ballingdon Hall, where Frances Carter grew up; further still to the right is Cornard Wood, which Gainsborough had painted in 1748.

While the landscape in the middle and far distances is depicted with faithfulness to the reality of gate and fence, licence is allowed in the foreground. Here a newly harvested cornfield has been invented, or transposed from further away. If read literally, the sheaves of corn would be thrusting through the porch of Auberies itself; but they are brought forward because they are beautiful, because they suggest abundance, and because (with some feeling for artistic licence) the reapers are seen to have allowed some sweet wild flowers on the grass verge to survive, while a few partridges glean in the stubble. At this point it is customary to observe that ‘sheaves of corn are a symbol of fertility’, and so they may be: but it should also be noted that Gainsborough evidently liked painting them, including them in his portrait of Mr and Mrs Gravenor (themselves evidently past procreation) with their children and in the portrait of his daughter Margaret as a child (see p. 95, fig. 2, under NG 1811).

Here the golden corn primarily informs us that the month is probably late July or early August; and its abundantly healthy state testifies to good husbandry. Robert Andrews was a keen agriculturist. Hugh Prince notes that the picture reveals that farming at the Auberies was conducted according to a newly improved system. ‘The wheat has been drilled, hawthorn hedges in the middle distance are neatly cut and laid, a new‐style five‐barred gate gives entry to a field where sheep are grazing and the sheep themselves are of a size and shape of breeds selected for feeding on turnips and artificial grasses.’³⁰ Robert Andrews’s proudest moment may have been when his letter On the Smut in Wheat, written in 1768 to Arthur Young, was published in Young’s Annals of Agriculture: ‘About the 26th of June, walking by the side of one of my fields of wheat, I observed a great number of ears of smut, or what we call burnt wheat, which very much surprised me, as I had never experienced the like before on my farm.’ Upon enquiry about ‘why they should be there, and in no other part of my wheat, the same seed being used through the whole crop’, he finally worked out that the crop with smut had come from seed ‘as it came from the flail…’, whereas the rest of the seed had been properly prepared. Though recounted with the ponderousness of the duller sort of sermon, all this reveals what in anyone but a prosperous landowner would be acclaimed as ‘the eighteenth‐century spirit of rational enquiry’. The moral is ‘to attend to the well preparing of seed wheat’; for good measure, his own recipe for a good preparatory ‘steep’ is attached, in which the chief ingredient is arsenic, which must be well boiled ‘to prevent the destroying of fowls, or birds, that may pick up the uncovered seed’.³¹

In a picture otherwise complete in every detail, Gainsborough has reserved a space on Mrs Andrews’s lap. Something is to be added, perhaps when Mr and Mrs Andrews have decided what it should be. Meanwhile the space is reserved by a few thin, light brown brushstrokes; these do not necessarily anticipate what is to be added, and might easily be painted over (or scraped off) when a decision has been reached. An upward direction in one brushstroke has prompted a long‐popular idea that the space was to be occupied by a cock pheasant shot by Mr Andrews and then [page [85]][page 86]dumped in his wife’s lap, tail‐feathers upwards. Even supposing that high summer is the season for pheasant‐shooting, that Mrs Andrews is docile enough to allow her beautiful blue gown to be bloodied by a newly shot pheasant and that Mr Andrews’s dog would be content with sniffing at his master’s pockets when he could be sniffing at a pheasant, the question which insistently intrudes is: why then did Gainsborough not simply go ahead and paint in a pheasant? He was enough of a countryman to know what a pheasant looked like without waiting until 1 September;³² but he would also have known that a sportsman with a newly shot bird would normally lay it on the ground, as he shows in Major Dade in Shooting Dress (fig. 3), put it into a game‐bag or hand it to a servant; if young and high‐spirited, he might hold it aloft, as in his friend Francis Hayman’s ‘pheasant’ portrait George Rogers with his Wife and Sister.³³ He does not dump it in a lady’s lap. What else might the space be left for? Seated ladies often have ‘work’ bags in their laps, for tatting or knotting; thus Gainsborough portrays Miss Lloyd, seated on a rather plainer garden seat in Richard Savage Lloyd and his Sister. Some carry lap‐dogs, but not usually when there is a larger working dog in the picture. Mrs Cobbold holds a parakeet (fig. 6). The unknown girl seated with a companion on yet another garden seat in the well‐known Conversation in a Park (Louvre) deploys an open fan, to evident effect. Most often, seated ladies carry straw hats: but Mrs Andrews is wearing hers.³⁴

Perhaps Mr and Mrs Andrews could not decide what they wanted. Or, perhaps, we should start with a different question. Why reserve a space? The answer may be ‘for something which has not yet happened’. If the picture is correctly dated to about 1750, Mr and Mrs Andrews had been married for about two years when they sat to Gainsborough. Sheaves of corn may symbolise but cannot ensure fertility. Their first child (Frances Louisa) was not born until 1751. The air which this couple have of possessing much but not yet all that they want might thus be explained. The space may have been reserved for a child for Mrs Andrews to hold. Infants in Gainsborough’s portraits usually stand by their mothers’ skirts; no other portrait by him of a mother actually holding a child is known (but then no other portrait by him of a lady fluttering a fan is known). The suggestion remains speculative. The puzzle of why Gainsborough never painted in the missing detail remains.

In time, Mr and Mrs Andrews had nine children, born between 1751 and 1769. Mrs Andrews died on 22 October 1780, aged 48. Robert Andrews remarried and lived on until the age of 80. A now untraced miniature portrait of him (reproduced in The Times on 22 April 1983) shows him aging and double‐chinned, but clearly recognisable as Gainsborough’s sitter. He died on 20 May 1806. Mr and Mrs Andrews lie side by side in the graveyard of St Andrew’s, Bulmer. A memorial tablet on the chancel wall affirms that Mrs Andrews was borne up by the three cardinal virtues:
By Faith, her prospects brightning at the last,
Hope clear’d the future, Charity the past.The tribute to Robert Andrews is more appropriately couched in prose:
Sincere & Ardent in ye Christian Faith
It uniformly influenc’d his Conduct,
Thro’ a long & useful Life;
Which he resign’d in Peace.³⁵With nine children to provide for, Robert Andrews had directed that Auberies and his estate should be sold; and thus, after a large sale in 1806, it passed into other hands.

Mr and Mrs Andrews would not have thought to become as unforgettable in British art as the Arnolfinis are in European art; but Gainsborough has made them so, with what R.W. Ketton‐Cremer in 1948 summed up as ‘a miraculous piece of painting, and a strangely moving evocation of the Suffolk scene, with that forgotten squire and his wife beside their harvest‐field, so conscious of their well‐stocked pastures and well‐kept fences beyond, so unconscious of the beauty of the woods and clouds with which the painter had surrounded them’.

Notes

Note: Auberies is strictly private. The compiler is very grateful to its present owner for kindly showing her the site of the portrait.