"A Peasant Family Traveling to Market" View more paintings

Thomas Gainsborough was the darling of 18th century British portraiture, but amid the enormous fame surged questions about his value that continue to this day. "There is no painter of English birth more widely appreciated than Gainsborough, whose art touches every observer, great and simple, learned and unlearned," wrote Gainsborough's biographer W.T. Witley. On the other hand, the pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne Jones, claimed that "Gainsborough's simply an impostor. He just scratches on the canvas over loose flimsy stains and puts markings in black around them."

Yet, high-class sitters flocked to the celebrity painter, believing Gainsborough (1727-88) could capture not only one's likeness, but one's refined sensibilities. Contemporary artists generally hold that aristocratic touch against him. As biographer Richard Ormond points out about another great portraitist, John Singer Sargent, "Social portraiture as recent as that of the Edwardian Age still arouses hostility." A portraitist such as Thomas Eakins fares better: his realism appeals more to our sense of honesty and democracy. In that company, Gainsborough is seen as a painter of innate, natural talents who wasted his skills putting pompous ladies and gentlemen on canvas. As the English critic Clive Bell remarked, "The emotion was personal and faithfully expressed." Yet even Bell had his doubts about Gainsborough's obeisance to his well-heeled subjects, adding that the artist "was dragged down by the demands of shallow society portraiture."

The eye-opening exhibit of Thomas Gainsborough at the Museum of Fine Arts puts Bell's second thoughts in context: it turns out Gainsborough's aristocratic portrayals of the idle rich obscure his greatest artistic feats: his absolute command of paint, his abstract, even impressionistic handling of the medium and, towards the end of his career, his enormously under recognized formalism.

None of these qualities are apparent in reproduction. Appreciating these qualities demands face to face encounters with a large number of original works, which makes shows such as this so important. It also makes the MFA's hanging of the canvases -- many above eye level -- so infernally annoying. Still, there's no denying that Gainsborough offers more to modern audiences than nostalgic reveries of wistful English aristocrats. Arranged in roughly chronological order, the show, which was first seen at London's Tate Britain and the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., consists of over 90 paintings and drawings as well as decorative objects and musical instruments, echoing the props Gainsborough depicted in his works.

The exhibit also touches on aspects of Gainsborough that are overlooked: his sly wit, lust for life, and remarkable musical and literary accomplishments. Part of the blame for this neglect goes to the artist himself, who played down his cultivated aspects. Still, signs of his intelligence and wry haughtiness are present everywhere. For instance, in his correspondence, Gainsborough often referred to his nephew and prot? Gainsborough Dupont as a "blockhead" who is "too proud to carry a bundle under his arm."

Gainsborough was born to a prosperous cloth merchant in Sudbury, England in 1727. Not long after he showed a remarkable talent for art, evident in his pre-adolescent self-portrait that opens the show. His family sent him to London to work under the engraver Gravelot. Gainsborough not only learned the techniques of the then-in-vogue Dutch landscapists, but came under the influence of William Hogarth's comically satirical eye, social idealism, and visual humor.

Eager to show that art could play a meaningful role in society, in 1748, Gainsborough became involved in a project that Hogarth organized, described in the lavishly illustrated and insightful exhibit catalog as "the most significant collaborative artist project of the time: the decoration of the general Court Room of the Foundling Hospital in London." The Foundling Hospital took in and cared for abandoned children, a project as controversial then as (unfortunately) now. By creating paintings for the hospital, the artists hoped to raise its profile, draw attention to the need for public charity, and announce that painters played a significant role in public life. A number of artists presented religious paintings. Others, such as Gainsborough, contributed pictures of other hospitals, suggesting that the Foundling Hospital stood in their company. Gainsborough's round painting, "The Charter House," demonstrates his deep understanding of such Dutch artists' works as Jacob Ruisdael. His depiction of light and his superb compositional arrangement of exquisitely wrought details, likewise, underscore his admirable technical skills.

"Self-Portrait" View more paintings

In the same year, Gainsborough and his wife of two years Margaret Burr moved to Ipswich, where he had his first commercial success as a painter, completing many conversation pieces, small-scale groups of figures, and two larger landscapes. As in many Gainsborough's landscapes, such as "The Harvest Wagon," high art cribbing is married to contemporary characters. The pyramid arrangement of figures on the wagon in the latter painting is thought to be based on Gainsborough's study of Ruben's "The Descent from the Cross." The handling of the woman in the picture, for whom Gainsborough most likely used his daughter Margaret as a model, was gleaned from Raphael's "Fire on the Borgo." The man mopping his brow was a direct lifted from Hogarth.

This mingling of classical art and quotations from contemporary culture set Gainsborough apart from his Royal Academy contemporaries, in particular, his friend and rival, Joshua Reynolds, whose subjects were placed in classical dress and settings. Gainsborough referred to his historical landscapes as "tragi-comic." As the catalog editors Martin Myrone and Michael Rosenthal aptly point out, "Gainsborough's wry radicalism might be the only response he could formulate to the changing times.'

In 1759, Gainsborough moved to the spa town of Bath, where his career as a portraitist took off and the scale of his canvases went life-size. Gainsborough's success was in large part due to his mastery of Sir Anthony Van Dyke's expert ability to render notable personages in seemingly life-like, casual poses. For him, as for van Dyke, portraiture was a staged projection of a public persona. Like a movie star, the sitter is presented in their most perfect state, no hair out of place, no signs of distraught or unhappiness, as can be seen in the air-brushed piety of Mr. and Mrs. William Hallet in "The Morning Walk."

Here, the titular couple walks through the woods, dressed to the nines, without a spot of dirt on their clothes, their dog in a pose of faithful devotion. Penetrating self-doubt, relentless realism, and social criticism of later English portraiture is nowhere present. Still, that kind of psychological tension makes an early appearance in Gainsborough's remarkable painting "Portrait of the Artist's Daughters." The odd posing of the girls along with the haunting ghost of a figure in the background lends the work an anxiousness that, perhaps, prefigured their fate: Neither girl married, nor took up painting as their father hoped.

"Diana and Actaeon" View more paintings

Gainsborough, however, was hardly beneath controversy. In 1771, he presented two portraits, that of Edward, Second Viscount Ligonier, and Penelope, Viscountess Ligonier, who were publicly estranged. Everyone knew the Viscountess was having an affair with Vittorio Amadeo, and Gainsborough did nothing to hide the fact. Shown months after Edward fought his rival in a duel, Gainsborough's portrait of Penelope presents a strong-willed, worldly, vivacious woman with a statuette of a dancing female bacchante looming in the background. By contrast, in his portrait of Edward, the Viscount's horse is nearly as prominent as he, causing the critic Robert Baker to remark, "The eye is equally divided between them; and it is feared that such people as affect to be witty, will say the horse is as good a man as his master."

At the same time, the kind of restless, flickering paint surfaces exploited by the Impressionists finds its precedent in some of Gainsborough's works. As Reynolds observed of the artist's paintings, "all those odd scratches and marks, which on close examination are so observable in Gainsborough's pictures, and which even to experienced painters appear rather the effect of accident than design; this chaos, this uncouth and shapeless appearance, by a kind of magic, at a certain distance assumes form, and all the parts seem to drop into their proper places."

Gainsborough was nearly as interested in paint as he was in his sitters, as was his fellow countryman J.M.W. Turner. The artist's use of swift short strokes to describe the jacket in his painting of Philippe Jacques de Loutherborg creates a surface of marks that one can get lost in, in much the same way as in a self-consciously complex Turner painting.

His landscapes, part real life observation and part studio construct, were often based on table-top dioramas he made with bits of moss and broccoli from trees. His experiments with light boxes, paint grounds and paint fillers, especially the use of ground glass, to create such effects as the thin silvery blue stripe and the magic-marker like trail of black lines in Isabella, Viscountess Molyneux's dress, are pure, optical pleasure.

And, then there is the startling "Diana and Actaeon," a masterpiece of formal invention. It is so seemingly half-heartedly drawn that the picture is sometimes considered an unfinished work. But nothing within the painting suggests it is incomplete. Instead, the canvas seems a summation of all the painterly effects littered throughout Gainborough's career, left here to exist on their own without the added burden of having to accurately depict a person or scene.

The clich?s that great artists are generations ahead of their time. In Gainsborough's case, the old saying is true. Locked in a century when abstraction was not a viable pursuit for a painter, Gainsborough mastered portraiture not to flatter rich snobs, but because it was the only means open to him to pursue his love of the sensual materiality of paint.

The Thomas Gainsborough exhibit is at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston through September 14, 2003.

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