Mr and Mrs Andrews analysis, Thomas Gainsborough, c.1750 | National Gallery.
THIS VIDEO IS FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY
The work is an unusual painting because it combines two types of painting which were popular during the 18th century. It’s both a double portrait and a landscape painting, giving a view of the English countryside on the Suffolk/Essex border.
Gainsborough's work mainly consisted of these two different genres, but the fact they’re shown side-by-side, was extremely unusual. Paintings which usually showed people engaging in an activity were called conversation pieces but usually they would be doing something indoors or in the garden, so this conversation piece in an open landscape really defies classification.
Gainsborough was famous for moaning that well-paid portrait-work kept him away from his true love of landscape painting, and that’s partly because portrait painting was considered a higher art-form than landscape so it was better paid. In letters, he said an endless parade of “damned faces”, prevented him from pursuing his true passion for landscapes.
The painting shows a recently married couple, Mr and Mrs Andrews or Robert and Frances Andrews. Robert’s father had bought him a estate, so a house with some land, and he’d also arranged a marriage for him. His new wife sitting beside him is Frances Mary Carter, who was brought up in the same parish of Bulmer. She was "not quite the girl next door, but probably the nearest marriageable girl of his own class". They were married in Sudbury about 18 months before this picture was painted, when he was 22 and she 16.
The church in the middle of the work is All Saints in Sudbury, where the couple had been married. So this painting is about commemorating Robert and Frances’ marriage, but not in an emotional way, it’s all about money and what they’re worth as a couple with their combined inheritance and dowry. They are the new power couple of the area, the two of the richest households who have joined together.
The painting is actually unfinished because there’s an area on Mrs Andrews' lap that’s been left blank or it’s been "reserved". Because it’s a brown colour, it’s been "a popular idea" that a pheasant was meant to be placed there, particularly as her husband is holding a gun. This could be unlikely though because the painting is probably set in the summer, whereas the legal start of the pheasant season was on September 1st. Other options include a work bag for embroidery, "tatting or knotting", as is often seen in portraits, a book, a fan, a lapdog, or it could be even saving a space for a baby who hasn’t been born yet. Their first child was a daughter born in 1751 so it’s possible Mrs Andrews could have been pregnant when this was painted.
It’s now in the National Gallery in London but until 1960, it belonged to the family. In March of 1960, Gerald Willoughbury Andrews who was a great-great-great-grandson of the couple sold the painting at Sotherby’s, and the Gallery bought it for 130 thousand pounds.
