Today being Father’s Day, this week’s choice of picture is Thomas Gainsborough’s tender portrait of his daughters Mary, aged six, and Margaret, aged four or five: “Molly and the Captain”, as he nicknamed them.
The Painter’s Daughters Chasing a Butterfly is a loving depiction of carefree youth and innocence but a faintly troubling picture too, charged with feelings deeper than sentimentality alone. The two girls holding hands are radiant in their silk dresses of silver and yellow (Mary’s dress being one of the brightest passages of that unreliable colour, Naples yellow, in all of eighteenth-century painting, thanks to the unusual purity of Gainsborough’s pigments); but we find them in a dark wood, under a stormy sky, with dusk approaching.
The day is short and childhood quickly passes: a common enough feeling for any parent to have, but Gainsborough has caught it with absolute precision and authenticity, choosing as his subject one of those moments when childhood seems to be passing even as one looks. With an attentive father’s keenness of observation, the artist notes the difference made by even the small gap of age that separates the two girls. Mary, the elder of the two, has already developed a certain air of circumspection and self-consciousness, implicit in her careful gaze, her restrained posture and the nearly adult, upright carriage of her head. Looking across to her from the more impetuous, instinctive figure of her little sister, Margaret, whose arms and legs seem somehow less tense and organised, and whose face still has a certain toddlerish chubbiness about it, one might almost be looking at a single girl at different stages in her life. Between the two the artist has left his picture almost blank, a void of scribbled underpaint marking as it were not space alone but also the...
The Painter’s Daughters Chasing a Butterfly is a loving depiction of carefree youth and innocence but a faintly troubling picture too, charged with feelings deeper than sentimentality alone. The two girls holding hands are radiant in their silk dresses of silver and yellow (Mary’s dress being one of the brightest passages of that unreliable colour, Naples yellow, in all of eighteenth-century painting, thanks to the unusual purity of Gainsborough’s pigments); but we find them in a dark wood, under a stormy sky, with dusk approaching.
The day is short and childhood quickly passes: a common enough feeling for any parent to have, but Gainsborough has caught it with absolute precision and authenticity, choosing as his subject one of those moments when childhood seems to be passing even as one looks. With an attentive father’s keenness of observation, the artist notes the difference made by even the small gap of age that separates the two girls. Mary, the elder of the two, has already developed a certain air of circumspection and self-consciousness, implicit in her careful gaze, her restrained posture and the nearly adult, upright carriage of her head. Looking across to her from the more impetuous, instinctive figure of her little sister, Margaret, whose arms and legs seem somehow less tense and organised, and whose face still has a certain toddlerish chubbiness about it, one might almost be looking at a single girl at different stages in her life. Between the two the artist has left his picture almost blank, a void of scribbled underpaint marking as it were not space alone but also the...
