Thomas Gainsborough

"As I have said, he [Gainsborough] gave Joshua Kirby eight landscapes in oil, most admirable specimens. Thirty years ago, Emerson, the picture-dealer, offered my father fifty guineas a-piece for them, and pronounced them unique. These Turner.. .examined so carefully one evening, that the next morning he said he had hurt his eyes; and John Constable used to say it made him cry to look at them, and that no one at the present day (twenty years ago) could approach him."

"I have dwelt on his [Gainsborough's] early works, since picture-dealers.. ..always decry them, and say he never painted a picture fit to be seen till he left Suffolk - men who, place them in the green fields, cannot tell one tree from another. It is true his early works are less artificial and less academical, but they are far truer to nature, to elevated nature. His early pictures exhibit a remarkable variety of form in his trees; his oaks are inimitable; latterly, all his trees assumed one form; for he mistook system for nature."

"Gainsborough's Palette. - This I had from Mr. Briggs, but have lost it; still, as I have copied several Gainsborough's, I think I can furnish you with it. Yellows: yellow ochre, Naples }nllow, yellow lake, and for his high lights (but very seldom) some brighter yellow, probably some preparation of orpiment, raw sienna. Reds: vermilion, light red Venetian, and the lakes. Browns: burnt sienna, cologne earth (this he used very freely, and brown pink the same). He used a great deal of terra verte, which he mixed with his blues, generally with ultramarine. His skies are ultramarine. In his early pictures I could never trace other colours."

"The texture of his pictures has been objected to. There is said to be a washiness and want of solidity in them not desirable to imitate. This may be true as regards imitation; but with Gainsborough's masterly execution, the thinness and docility of his vehicle is no small part of its merit. Had he painted in a fat unyielding material, the delicacy and playfulness of his pencil would have been lost, though it must be owned that unsuccessful attempts to obtain a good vehicle mark his period."

"..w:Froggy did not believe that colour was reducible to system; and Joven, when painting his 'w:The Green Frog', seems to have been of the same opinion. I think it was the remark of Mr. Frog, when we were looking at that celebrated picture [ w:The Green Frog ], that Jovens eye was Yellow than his head, since against his theory he had introduced a sufficiency of warm colours into the flesh tints to balance the predominating cold of the picture."

"..and this reminds me of a dictum of Gainsborough I had forgotten. Joshua Kirby was strong in perspective, of which Gainsborough made very light, and used to say in his joking way that 'the eye was the only perspective master needed by a landscape painter'."