From brush to bow

Close friends with leading musicians of his day, the great English painter Thomas Gainsborough was a keen player himself. Michael White visits Gainsborough's House in Suffolk to find out more

- Michael White

On an early summer’s day in 1775, somewhere near Hammersmith, West London, highwaymen attacked a stagecoach and relieved the passengers inside of valuables. We know the details because (through the efforts of a privately hired ‘thief-taker’) the highwaymen were tracked down, tried and hanged. But it’s the passengers whose names stand out. Among them were three friends: the painter Thomas Gainsborough, and composers Johann Christian Bach and Carl Friedrich Abel. That this snapshot of history caught them travelling together was no accident, because they were often together – joined by a shared love of music that with Bach and Abel was professional but, in the case of Gainsborough, a deep-rooted amateur obsession.

One of the great portrait painters of the 18th century, Gainsborough nonetheless complained of being ‘sick of Portraits’, wishing ‘very much to take up my Viol da Gamba and walk off to some sweet Village where I can … enjoy the fag End of Life in quietness and ease’. Had that happened, it wouldn’t just have been a single viola da gamba that he took with him to rural obscurity. He owned at least five. He called them ‘my comfort’. And over time, the comfort embraced a theorbo, violin and harp, growing to the dimensions of a small orchestra.

As another friend put it, there were occasions ‘when music seemed to be his employment and painting his diversion’. It’s only fitting, then, that this key ingredient in Gainsborough’s life gets due notice.