Young Hobbinol and Ganderetta
Maker
Thomas Gainsborough
(British, 1727-1788)
Collections
ClassificationsPAINTINGS
Dateca.1788
Mediumoil on canvas
Dimensionscanvas: 49 1/4 × 39 3/4 in. (125.1 × 101 cm.)
frame: 59 1/4 × 50 × 5 in. (150.5 × 127 × 12.7 cm.)
Credit LineThe Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Adele S. Browning Memorial Collection, gift of Mildred Browning Green and Honorable Lucius Peyton Green
Label TextGainsborough once characterized the ragged rural peasants and agricultural laborers that dot his landscapes as no more than "a little business for the Eye"--compositional accents momentarily distracting our attention from the trees "in order to return to them with more glee." The comment disingenuously understates the actual importance of these figures in reinforcing the themes and moods that Gainsborough intended his landscapes to convey. He acknowledged as much himself during the last seven years of his life, while painting a series of fanciful rural scenes in which the human figure, rather than the land, becomes the principal object of attention. Hobbinol and Ganderetta is an example of this sort of "fancy picture" (as they were known in the eighteenth century), in which the rustic figures of Gainsborough's landscapes and cottage scenes are enlarged to the size of life and treated with tender sympathy. The majority of Gainsborough's paintings of this type represent poor children in rural settings, and are patently designed to tug at our heartstrings by invoking poignant sentiments of compassion and charity. One critic who saw Hobbinol and Ganderetta in 1789 observed, "That pathetic simplicity which is the most powerful appeal to the feelings, is given with peculiar effect in this performance...--the cat--the spoon--the milk-porringer, all aid the scene, and present a view of domestic innocence." Another considered the painting "formed to interest every beholder, to whom the innocence of early life is interesting." Such comments underscore Gainsborough's success in merging the literary ideal of rural simplicity, celebrated in the poetry of James Thomson and William Somerville (1675-1742), with the cult of childhood innocence inculcated by the philosophical writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-78).Although Gainsborough (like his rival Joshua Reynolds) appears to have painted poor children from life, fancy pictures such as Hobbinol and Ganderetta project an artificially palatable version of impoverished rural childhood, in which the torn and tattered rags are charmingly arranged on clean, plump bodies, and the gathering and consumption of food provide reassuring leitmotifs. Here, even the cat is notably well-fed, its exquisitely painted, luxuriant fur lending a sumptuous quality to the scene. Similarly, the rosy cheeks and lips of the children attest to the superior health that cottage children were thought to gain from robust outdoor exercise. Like many of Gainsborough's fancy pictures, Hobbinol and Ganderetta suggests the influence of the Spanish genre and religious painter Bartolomé Esteban Murillo (1617-1682), whose works Gainsborough had studied and copied in the 1770s. In the present work, he emulates not only the warm earthtones and strong chiaroscuro of Murillo, but also the sympathetic naturalism of his observations. In particular, Gainsborough has adopted the physical and emotional intimacy that Murillo brought to his paired groupings of beggar boys and flower girls, as well as the naive complacency that renders these children touchingly oblivious to privations that are all too obvious to the viewer. As others have noted, Gainsborough's emulation of Murillo raised the pretensions of his low-life subjects by setting them within the Old Master tradition. In this way, his fancy pictures achieved an intellectual character approaching that of the grand manner.
In April 1788 Hobbinol and Ganderetta was one of two pictures by Gainsborough featured in "The Gallery of British Poets," an exhibition of paintings executed in response to native poetry, organized by the stationer and printseller Thomas Macklin. As Gainsborough had ceased to exhibit publicly in 1784 (following his argument with the Royal Academy over the hanging of his pictures), his appearance in Macklin's gallery was a matter of considerable interest. Inspired by the notion of a "natural alliance between the Fine Arts," the exhibition was intended to show that painting and poetry shared the same objectives: "the awakening of the generous and social affections, the humanizing of the heart, and the imparting of a general taste and relish for beauty and excellence." Hobbinol and Ganderetta ostensibly takes as its subject William Somerville's mock heroic epic Hobbinol, or, the Rural games, first published in 1740. This lengthy poem concerns the teenage king and queen of the May, Hobbinol and his cousin Ganderetta, who preside over a series of games. Gainsborough's painting obviously represents much younger children, but Macklin's exhibition catalogue accounted for this discrepancy by titling the painting "Young Hobbinol and Ganderetta" and quoting several lines at the very beginning of the poem, in which Somerville invites the reader's sympathy by alluding to the motherless childhood of "the helpless pair," during which "the pretty wantons" slept in the same cradle and played together on the floor.
Gainsborough's painting seems an esoteric response to the poem to say the least, especially when it is realized that in addition to representing far more youthful figures than those featured by Somerville, he has apparently painted two girls, rather than a male and a female. Although the artist's broad, vigorous handling does not admit of much detail, it is clear that both children wear girls' clothes; the one on the right wears red stays over her white linen shift (with one of the straps visible on her proper left shoulder), while her partner wears a turban-like linen cap over long curly hair, a style generally restricted to girls. Significantly, the stipple engraving of the painting that Macklin commissioned from Peltro William Tomkins and published on January 20, 1790 heightens the gender distinctions between the two figures by shortening the hair of the kneeling child, and feminizing the lefthand figure (whose eyes now focus directly on the viewer) with more decoratively delineated blond curls and a pronounced smile.
The same confusion over age and gender characterized the second Gainsborough painting in The Gallery of Poets, which many critics singled out as the finest picture in the exhibition. This painting of a child carrying a bowl of milk appeared in Macklin's catalogue as Lavinia, the beautiful, fatherless girl in James Thomson's poem of that name. The title was evidently appended without consultation with Gainsborough, however, for Henry Bate, the painter's critical mouthpiece, revealed in a review that the painting actually depicts a male figure, and would more appropriately be titled the "Cottage Boy," rather than "oddly perverted by Macklin to the Lavinia of Thomson." Another critic pointed out that the figure was far younger than suggested in Thomson's poem, and a few months after Gainsborough's death Bate supplemented his earlier comments by acknowledging "Mr. Gainsborough was not a man of reading, nor was the figure of Lavinia, which was lately exhibited, painted from Thomson's character (for at the time the figure was painted, it is probable he had never read the book) but a little simple character from his own imagination." The so-called Lavinia had actually been completed by 1786, a year before Macklin published the prospectus for his Poets' Gallery. Given its consistency with imagery that Gainsborough had long pursued independently, it seems likely that the present painting, like "Lavinia," was carried out according to Gainsborough's own poetic fancy, and that Macklin imposed the association with a particular poem in order to fit the work to the parameters of his exhibition. Significantly, contemporary reviews emphasized the painting's truth to "the rustic simplicity of the Poet," without addressing its fidelity to the letter of Somerville's text.
Macklin reportedly paid Gainsborough £350 for Hobbinol and Ganderetta, a remarkable price that demonstrates the rapidly rising valuation of his fancy pictures. In 1782, Joshua Reynolds had purchased the larger Girl with Pigs (which Reynolds considered "by far the best picture he [Gainsborough] has ever painted") for slightly more than £100, and Gainsborough had been delighted by the sale. In August 1788 The Morning Herald reported that Macklin had offered more than £500 for Gainsborough's fancy picture A Woodman in a Storm, and was bidding against "an agent from the Continent" who was also anxious to acquire it. None of these paintings qualifies as a direct illustration of a literary text, but in all of them Gainsborough tenderly conveys a mood of gentle pathos and rustic simplicity that links them with some of the most elegant poetry of his day.
Status
Not on viewObject number78.20.30
