About this lot

Description

Self Portrait (c.1740–42) standing three quarter length, in green, holding a palette and paintbrush oil on paper, laid down to canvas 22.9 x 20.3cmProvenance: Ernest Albert Butcher, Australia, Acquired from his estate, through Adrienne Corri, by Neville Podmore in 1974; With Felder Old Master Paintings, London, 2001; With Philip Mould by 2003, With Historical Portraits Ltd, London, by 2005, Private collection, Kensington, London, from 2008 Exhibited: Southampton City Art Gallery, The Stuart Portrait: Status and Legacy, October-December 2001, no. 43; London, Felder Fine Art, Portraits, 2002, no. 3; London, Tate Britain; Washington DC, National Gallery of Art; Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, Gainsborough, 24th October 2002 - 14th September 2003, no. 1Literature: A. Corri, 'Gainsborough's Early Career: New Documents and Two Portraits', in Burlington Magazine, CXXV, April 1983, p. 214, col. fig. 1; M. Cormack, The Paintings of Thomas Gainsborough, Cambridge 1991, p. 7; M. Rosenthal, The Art of Thomas Gainsborough, New Haven and London 1999, p. 5, repr. col.; M. Postle, British Artists: Thomas Gainsborough, London 2002, pp. 7–8, fig. 2 col; W. Vaughan, Gainsborough, London 2002, pp. 16–17, fig. 10 col.; J. Ingamells, National Portrait Gallery: Mid-Georgian Portraits 1760–90, London 2004, p. 176; J. Hamilton, Gainsborough: A Portrait, London 2017, p. 20, col. pl. 20; H. Belsey, Thomas Gainsborough: The Portraits, Fancy Pictures and Copies after Old Masters, 2 vols., New Haven and London 2019, vol. I, pp. 2, 352, 901, cat. no. 366, repr. col.We are grateful to Hugh Belsey for compiling the following note: - "There can be little doubt that Gainsborough was born with a precocious intelligence and a God-given ability to paint. Attributing the work he produced in his teenage years has been slow and it remains contentious. No doubt unidentified examples will appear in the future and help to clarify his development as an artist. The majority of scholars have accepted this likeness as autograph, perhaps his very earliest extant portrait, and it has been widely exhibited and published. Dating the portrait has been difficult and it seems most likely that it is one of his earliest attempts at oil painting made soon after he moved from his native Sudbury in Suffolk to London in about 1740. There his apprenticeship, like William Hogarth’s, was with a silversmith and his skill as a draughtsman was honed by engraving inscriptions and coats-of-arms on the side of silverware. It was not long before his abilities caught the eye of Francis Hayman, the French draughtsman, Hubert Gravelot and the most original artist working at the time, William Hogarth. It must have been these associations that encouraged him to turn to painting. When, having returned to Suffolk, Gainsborough then moved to Bath in the late 1750s, his style responding to the market around him and it progressed with extraordinary speed. There is every reason to believe that a similar acceleration in the development of his work took place twenty years earlier. In the last ten years a number of canvases have been connected with his name and his earliest years as a painter and they reveal a path towards the well-known portrait of the Revd Hill’s dog Bumper dated 1745, now in a private collection in Norfolk. In this small painting the colour sings, the immediacy of the image shows great technical virtuosity but there remain uncertainties of composition and the background has a conspicuous absence of any middle ground. The delicate, almost emaciated facial features of Gainsborough as seen in his Portrait with wife and child dating from c. 1746 in the National Gallery and the Self-portrait drawing from the following decade in the British Museum are close enough to those in the young boy, to confirm the identity and the attribution. In 2001 Rica Jones made a thorough technical examination of the self-portrait and linked the technique used by the young artist with later uncontested paintings. She discovered that there are two other images painted beneath the present paint surface, the first has been tentatively identified as a landscape, and that the pigments used are consistent with those in the palettes of other artists working in the mid-eighteenth century and they all appear in the artist’s later work. While this is all circumstantial (rather than definitive) evidence, it is substantial and Jones's work provides the final piece of the jig-saw that enables a full attribution of this small panting to the artist. It is exceptionally rare for an artist to produce a self-portrait in oil at the age of 13. Remarkably few artists have ever attempted it."Condition report: Oil on paper attached to a thin gauze with a linen backing. There are minor undulations across the surface. The paint layer is in a good condition. There is a network of drying cracks across the surface which appear dark in the lighter areas of the flesh. A few, small old damages have been repaired, for example below the sitter’s right hand. Scattered retouchings across the surface are well matched to the original. The varnish is semi-matte and even. The frame is in a good condition with a few small losses to the gilded surface.

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