In February 1788, the English painter Thomas Gainsborough attended the impeachment of Warren Hastings in Westminster Hall. He left the proceedings early because of the discomfort caused by a chill upon the back of his neck. On his return home, he found the source of this chill to be a hard round spot, the size of a shilling. During the months that followed, the pain in his neck increased, and his general condition began to deteriorate. He believed that he had cancer, and busied himself in settling his affairs. He died at the age of 61 in September 1788. Although a magazine of the time stated that a non-malignant tumor had killed him through the mechanical pressure on various delicate structures which are found in the neck, modern medical opinion from the evidence available inclines towards malignancy. He was buried privately in Kew.
At some time during the winter of that year, the paintings which remained in his studio were sold off. A large painting of three hounds coursing a fox, which now hangs in Kenwood House on Hampstead Heath, was included in the sale. Although it is undated, it is generally agreed to have been one of the last paintings that Gainsborough completed.
The painting measures 180 cms high by 230 cms long. It shows a fox bitten on the back of the neck by one hound and seized at the hind leg by another. A third hound closes in. The composition is unusually serene, considering the subject matter. At least that was my initial impression.
I visited Kenwood House for the first time in 1991. I had come out for the walk across the heath, and to see the Dutch paintings for which the house is well known. At that time in my life, I was in a state of great agitation. The walk did nothing to calm me down. When I entered the house, the fact that Hals, Rembrandt and Vermeer left me unmoved took me still deeper into a state of self-absorption. I came eventually to the Orangery, where three Gainsborough paintings had been hung: the portrait of Mary Countess Howe, two shepherd boys with dogs fighting, and hounds coursing a fox.
I’d seen reproductions of the first two paintings, but was unfamiliar with the third, which I immediately felt to be a different kind of painting than the others I had seen that day. Hounds coursing a fox depicted an act of violence, yet was essentially calm and controlled. This combination filled me with an unexpected sense of relief. The painting engaged the tension inside me and began to unravel it. The slow rhythms and silver colouring held and soothed me.
The experience of looking at the painting had more in common with listening to music than is normally the case with me, its appeal was direct and visceral. The physical presence of the painter, which can be conveyed through the immediacy of the marks on the canvas, was more pronounced, and beyond these sensations lay the realization that I was encountering something that did not remind me of anything else. This remained with me and puzzled me. A little later in the day, having remembered the circumstances of Gainsborough’s death, I returned to the house to take another look at the painting. If Gainsborough were a painter who, through symbolism and allegory, had dealt with the events of his own life, given the uncertainty over the date of the picture, the hound’s teeth set in the back of the fox’s neck by it by now have been linked with the tumour that killed him.
It is easy to see a representation of annihilation in the intense whiteness of the hound’s neck, and mortality in its skull-like head.
However, Thomas Gainsborough’s reputation dissuades art historians from such speculation.
The ambitious 18th-century artist aspired to history painting, the depiction of scenes from the Bible, European history or classical literature. Gainsborough set himself against this trend, and chose to represent himself as someone who preferred a less complicated subject matter.
In reply to a friend, who advised him to introduce biblical figures into his landscapes, he wrote, “Do you really think that a regular composition in the landscape way should ever be filled with history or any figures, but such as fill a place? I won’t say stop a gap, or create a little business for the eye to be drawn from the trees in order to return to them with more glee.”
As a result of his consistent opposition to any literary content in his work, he has been spared the particular analysis of his themes that other 18th-century painters such as Stubbs or Reynolds have been subjected to. His later work, however, contains figures that do more than “create a little business for the eye.” One such picture, “Two Shepherd Boys with Dogs Fighting”, dated 1783 hangs alongside Hounds Coursing a Fox” at Kenwood. The boy whose colouring identifies him with the losing dog, is trying to stop the fight, while the boy whose darker colouring identifies him with the victorious dog is preventing him. The painting has a curious sexual quality. The impetus of the straight-backed black dog towards the gaping, wet red mouth of the dog lying on his back is orgasmic. The delight in the face of the boy, who caresses as much as he grapples with his friend, goes beyond the thrill of a dog fight. Although the image is that of a straightforward contest between good and evil, the composition of the picture makes that image far more complex and ambiguous. The voyage which the eye takes around the limbs and bodies of the boys and the dogs both thrills and calms. The protagonists are opposed, yet in pictorial terms form part of a greater unity.
Gainsborough, in a letter to Sir William Chambers, refers to the painting in a typically self-depreciating way.
“I believe that next exhibition I shall make the boys fighting and the dogs looking on. You know my cunning way of avoiding great subjects in painting, and of concealing my ignorance by a flash in the pan… If I can pick pockets in the portrait way two or three years longer, I intend to sneak into a cot and turn a serious fellow.”
While he makes no attempt to clarify the subject matter of the painting, the interchangeability of people and animals is stressed, albeit light-heartedly.
The picture which is always cited as being outside Gainsborough’s usual ambit is “Diana and Acteon”, which hangs in the Queen’s collection. It shows the moment at which Acteon surprises Diana and her nymphs bathing, and the beginning of his transformation into a stag. This is widely believed to be Gainsborough’s last picture. Here, through the use of myth, the identification between the animal and a man is explicit. Acteon’s fate is to be hunted down and torn apart by his own hounds. There are parallels here with hounds coursing a fox.
A story about Gainsborough and his wife in Bolton’s biography is worth retelling at this point. “Whenever Gainsborough spoke crossly to his wife, a remarkably sweet-tempered woman, he would write a note of repentance and sign it with the name of his favourite dog, Fox, and address it to Margaret’s pet spaniel, Tristram. Fox would take the note in his mouth and duly deliver it to Tristram. Margaret would then answer, “My own dear Fox, you are always loving and good, and I am a naughty little female ever to worry you as often as I do” “.
A double portrait of Tristram and Fox hung over the Gainsborough’s fireplace. Fox was of a breed known at the time as a fox hound, so called because of their resemblance to a fox, rather than in recognition of their hunting abilities. Margaret Gainsborough, for one, would have seen in her husband’s painting of the death of a fox a good deal more than a hunting scene in the manner of the Dutch animal painter Hans Snyders, which is how the painting is referred to these days. “Hounds Coursing a Fox”, despite its violence, is a gentle painting, and there is a reason why this is so. The work possesses, to an extreme degree, the often underrated virtue of tact. He has made a work which does not seek to communicate his own distress, but which removes the spectator from that distress, while simultaneously positioning him or her in an exact relationship to it. For those who do not read the symbolism, the picture must delight and soothe. For those who do, it must console. Although the fox is turning in pain to face the hounds bearing down upon it, the rhythms within the group of animals suggest a process of unification rather than extinction.
The leg of the hound of the fox’s neck bends over the rump of the fox in a perfect caress. The line of the underbelly of the fox is continued in the underbelly of the hound. To describe, to continue to describe the echoing of forms, the lines which run through the picture, the play of light and dark would be otiose. Yet it is here that the meaning of the picture is revealed, rather than in its symbolism. I would suggest, as a metaphor, that the fox and hounds are becoming one; they are changing into one of Thomas and Margaret Gainsborough’s beloved fox – hounds. The breadth of conception, the brilliance of the formal invention, and the almost overwhelming power of the emotion invested within the work, are placed before us with a gentleness which is unique in my experience. It is in this gentleness that the relationship of the viewer to the artist is established.
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