Date: 14-08-2005
Owning Institution: National Gallery
Publication:     Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”  
Subject:   18th Century    

The second of this month’s four pictures for summer is Thomas Gainsborough’s much loved portrait of the English country squire Robert Andrews and his young wife, enjoying the August sunshine on their country estate. The work was painted in about 1750. Now widely regarded as one of the quintessential masterpieces of English painting, Mr and Mrs Andrews was virtually unknown until 1927, when it was put on public display for the first time, in Gainsborough’s bicentenary exhibition at Ipswich. Having remained in the ownership of the sitters’ family for more than two centuries, it was finally put up for sale in 1960 and subsequently purchased by the National Gallery, where it can still be seen today.

The picture was commissioned to celebrate the marriage of Robert Andrews and his bride, Frances Mary, nee Carter, which took place in the parish church of All Saints, Sudbury, on 10 November 1748. Close inspection of the landscape reveals that the painter has artfully created a break between the trees in the woodland behind Mrs Andrews, through which the church where the couple made their vows can be seen. The picture is a gentle celebration of good husbandry, in every sense. Mr Andrews, gundog by his side, gun held under his arm, is presented as the very embodiment of self-assured, nonchalant dependability. His credentials, it can be safely assumed, are as solid as the oak that shelters him and his wife. She will want for nothing. The extensive landscape which the couple occupy is the guarantee of their future prosperity. Gainsborough presents it as a fertile, secular paradise, a green and gold English Eden. Sheaves of recently cropped corn are piled in an abundant stack in the foreground. Wild flowers grow in the margins of the field and partridge can be seen nesting in the stubble.

Robert Andrews was a gentleman from Bulmer, just on the Essex side of the Suffolk-Essex border, where his family owned land. His wife, Frances, was the daughter of William Carter, a rich cloth merchant, who owned Ballingdon Hall in Ballingdon, a hamlet in the parish of Bulmer, as well as a number of properties in Essex. Those properties included the half-share of an estate outside Bulmer, called Auberies. The other half of that estate had been owned by Robert Andrews’ father, and was subsequently inherited by Robert Andrews himself. That estate is the setting for the picture reproduced on this page. All of which makes it seems likely that the union celebrated in Gainsborough’s picture was an arranged marriage, common practice among the English gentry at the time. As Judy Egerton expresses it in her admirable catalogue to the National Gallery’s British School pictures, “When Robert Andrews married his bride, he was marrying not quite the girl next door, but probably the nearest marriageable girl of his own class.”

Gainsborough had known Robert Andrews since childhood, when they both attended Sudbury Grammar School. This may explain why neither husband nor wife have dressed with anything like the formality customary in most eighteenth-century wedding portraits. Posing for his boyhood friend, Robert Andrews looks so relaxed that he might almost to have wandered into the picture on the spur of the moment, dressed as he is in his baggy shooting jacket, tricorn hat balanced jauntily on his head. Sacheverell Sitwell, who included an entertaining description of the painting in his book Conversation Pieces, published in 1936, dwelt at some length on the effect of insouciance created by the sitter’s choice of costume, noting “the loose, flapping lapels of his coat, the wrinkles of his sleeves and waistcoat, his gloves creasing at the wrist, and the twisted bags of shot that dangle from his pocket.”

For her part, Mrs Andrews, who was no more than eighteen when the picture was painted, sits somewhat warily upright on a splendidly elaborate bench – an object which would have to have been hand-carved from wood, given that the painting predates the invention of wrought iron. This extravagantly sinuous seat, the epitome of rococo style, seems appropriately organic in form. It may well have been invented by Gainsborough as a pictorial device – a ay of rooting the young Mrs Andrews in the landscape, both literally and metaphorically. It certainly seems unlikely that such a painstakingly crafted article of furniture would have been left outside at the mercy of the elements. Like her husband, Mrs Andrews is dressed informally, in a matching skirt and jacket of a silk so radiantly blue that it resembles a piece of fallen sky. Her shoes are backless mules, hardly suitable for wandering the countryside, but then she probably never did walk outdoors in them. Gainsborough painted the couple in his studio, according to his normal practise, later transplanting them into a landscape closely observed from reality.

There is an intriguing area of blank canvas in the area of Mrs Andrews’ lap, the cause of much subsequent speculation. What might Gainsborough have intended, eventually, to place there? The question is impossible to answer with certainty but the intention may have been, one day, to have her cradling one of her children on her lap. The picture is, after all, a wedding portrait, and sheaves of corn are a symbol of fertility, expressing the hope that the couple’s union will prove to be as fruitful as their land.

That hope was realised, although just why Gainsborough never quite finished the portrait remains a mystery. Mrs Andrews bore her husband nine children in all. The effort of doing so may well have taken its toll. She died in 1780, just forty-eight years old, while her husband subsequently remarried and lived to the ripe old age of 80. They were reunited in death and are still buried together, side by side, in the graveyard of St Andrew’s, Bulmer.