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March 2016

Vol. 158 / No. 1356

An artist’s house and its future

In 1956 a house in the market town of Sudbury was advertised for sale in Country Life. Of late medieval origins, it had, like many other houses in the town, been developed in the Georgian period and given an elegant street façade. What distinguished it was that it had been the home of Thomas Gainsborough in his youth. A group of local supporters, including Sir Alfred Munnings, inspired by a recent campaign to save Renoir’s House at Cagnes-sur-Mer, got together and raised the funds to acquire the house; it was then opened to the public in 1961. Since then it has flourished as a museum dedicated to the artist, opening seven days a week, mounting temporary exhibitions and gradually acquiring a significant collection of paintings, drawings and prints by Gainsborough, as well as a large archive of material relating to the artist.

In December 2015, Gainsborough’s House submitted a stage 1 application to the Heritage Lottery Fund for a project that could radically transform its future; the decision on this will be made later this month. In recent years, funding has been in short supply for many regional museums and galleries. From 2011 to 2013 the House had to operate without a Director and other core staff, but, over the last three years, this situation has been reversed. Staff numbers have doubled, the programme of events has been far more ambitious, and last year the House achieved the highest visitor numbers in its history.

Reviving an Artist’s Birthplace: A National Centre for Thomas Gainsborough is a plan to redevelop Gainsborough’s House and convert the building and land, recently acquired by Babergh District Council, at the back of the House. The aim is to radically improve how Gainsborough is presented, through a gain of four new display areas, as well as a designated space for larger temporary exhibitions. This will benefit not only Gainsborough’s House, but also the town and the region.

House-museums devoted to individuals offer insights into the character and interests of the artist, writer or musician and can also examine the age in which they lived. The aim is to keep a balance between the two. The way in which this will be achieved at Sudbury is by converting the newly acquired building into a landmark gallery. Gainsborough’s art can then be shown in a purpose-built gallery environment. This will leave the House free to explore the artist’s life and character, and the period in which he lived. It will enable the House to present recently discovered material concerning hitherto-unknown aspects of Gainsborough’s life and background, while the new gallery will have the space to accommodate large-scale works and full-length portraits. Visitors, therefore, will be able to see a greater range of the artist’s achievements before entering Gainsborough’s House, which will provide a context for his art.

The challenge is to evoke the spirit of an artist, without the House becoming a static shrine or losing its sense of authenticity. Evocations of the past are attractive to visitors, but, as in the case of Gainsborough’s House, not many objects original to the Georgian period remain; and questions of security, as well as environmental concerns, can make it difficult to display objects as they would have been seen when the artist was alive. Should more ephemeral effects be recreated? There are house-museums where this has been done well, as at Charleston, the former home of certain members of the Bloomsbury group, where the visitor gains the sense that the room is still in use and its residents are merely temporarily absent. The Watts Gallery, at Compton, near Guildford, is also particularly noteworthy in having undergone extensive renovations while maintaining the artist’s own vision and sense of place. But all too often in house-museums it is necessary to employ minor interventions around individual objects for security reasons, which, however discreet, can alter their context and the experience offered to the visitor.

With the encouragement of the Paul Mellon Centre, Gainsborough’s House developed a project called The Painting Room (closed 21st February). This culminated in a two-day symposium, one day held in London and the second in Sudbury, and in a temporary exhibition (Fig.I) co-curated with Giles Waterfield, in which objects were gathered together, such as Reynolds’s easel and sitters’ chair (lent by the Royal Academy, London), as well as paint bladders, an écorché and a bust of blind Homer that would have been used in a Georgian studio. The curators created a mock-up of what such a room might have looked like (Fig.II). It proved a useful exercise, helping the custodians of the house gain ideas as to how they might order the display of rooms in the future. The intention is to use wall texts and labels in the House, but with discretion: there is always the danger of being visually intrusive and breaking the spell that can be evoked by sensitive historic re-creation.

While pursuing these ideas for future displays, Gainsborough’s House developed an important partnership with the Rijksmuseum Twenthe in Enschede, Holland. This was the first Dutch museum to acquire a Gainsborough painting, and its curators were keen to mount at Enschede the exhibition Gainsborough in his own Words (20th March to 24th July), which sets out to interpret his art, with the help of some of Gainsborough’s letters, to a Dutch public unfamiliar with his work. This exhibition will offer valuable lessons for Gainsborough’s House. It is lending a large number of paintings, drawings and contextual material to Holland, and, in return, Gainsborough’s House is borrowing from the Rijksmuseum Twenthe nine ­seventeenth-century Dutch landscapes, including works by Jan van Goyen, Salomon van Ruysdael and Aert van der Neer. The fact that Dutch landscapes of this kind had a crucial influence on Gainsborough’s early development makes their arrival in Sudbury a moment of real importance to the House.

Gainsborough’s House is fortunate to have not only the house where the artist lived, but also his garden with its ancient mulberry tree (Fig.III). Sudbury is still surrounded by the ­landscape Gainsborough loved. According to his contemporary Philip Thicknesse, ‘there was not a Picturesque clump of Trees, nor even a single Tree of beauty, no, nor hedge row [. . .] for some miles round about the place of his nativity, that he had not so perfectly in his mind’s eye’.1 This reminds us that, although art is often today shown within a vacuum or white space, it certainly was not created in one.

It is to be hoped that developing Gainsborough’s House into a national centre for the artist, and providing a major gallery for the region will help to spearhead the redevelopment of
this historic market town. Local pride and a centre that focuses on one of Britain’s greatest artists can encourage cultural tourism. Gainsborough’s House is fortunate to receive the ­support of trusts, funds and individuals. The artist himself once wrote: ‘What will become of me time must show; I can only say that my present situation with regard to encouragement is all that heart can wish but as all worldly success is precarious I don’t build happiness, or the expectation of it, upon present appearances. I have built upon sandy foundations all my life long’.2 Yet since his death in 1788 his reputation has remained consistently and deservedly high, and Gainsborough’s House is able to build upon this firm foundation.

Mark Bills
Director, Gainsborough’s House

1     P. Thicknesse: A Sketch of the life and paintings of Thomas Gainsborough, Esq., London 1788, p.6.2     T. Gainsborough, Letter to Mary Gibbon (his sister), 26th December 1775, in J. Hayes, ed.: The Letters of Thomas Gainsborough, New Haven and London 2001, p.129.