Francesca Kaes // Paper landscapes: Thomas Gainsborough as graphic artist
Known to many primarily as a painter of both society portraiture and rustic landscapes, Thomas Gainsborough (1727–88) was also a prolific and highly experimental graphic artist. Over the span of five decades, the artist produced more than a thousand drawings, and his prints of the 1770s and ‘80s represent some of the most intriguing examples from the early history of aquatint and soft-ground etching. Gainsborough’s drawings have received significant scholarly and curatorial attention, with John Hayes’ magisterial catalogue raisonnée The Drawings of Thomas Gainsborough (1971) and its supplements forming the basis for subsequent analysis. The artist’s prints, by contrast, remain less familiar, despite Hayes’ companion catalogue Gainsborough as Printmaker (1972). In part, this is because Gainsborough only ever made some twenty printed images. More importantly, however, his prints have largely been considered as reproductive of his drawings, which seemingly has foreclosed a more critical assessment of their function within his oeuvre. With recent print scholarship moving beyond simplistic notions of ‘original’ and ‘reproduction’, this project seeks to complicate the relationship between the two media by focusing on the specific mediality of both. It will examine the function of both drawing and printmaking in Gainsborough’s oeuvre, asking more specifically if the artist’s practices as a draughtsman and printmaker represent two separate artistic projects, with distinct aesthetic concerns and problems, or if he used the two media as two modes of exploring and expressing the same ideas. Further, the project seeks to understand if and how Gainsborough’s experimentation with the different graphic techniques fed back into his use of the other, i.e. did his practice of drawing inform his approach to printmaking, and, crucially, did his experience with aquatint and soft-ground etching find its way back into his drawing practice?
The project expands on my doctoral research on the intermediality and theoretical affordances of practices of drawing, painting, and printmaking in eighteenth-century British art. It will inform work on a forthcoming exhibition about Gainsborough’s works on paper at the British Museum in 2029.