Thomas Gainsborough ra 1727–1788
NG 1811 
The Painter’s Daughters chasing a Butterfly

Judy Egerton, 2000

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

? c. 1756

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

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.

Notes