BATH.- No.1 Royal Crescent is presenting the exhibition Being There, featuring four recently acquired Thomas Gainsborough portraits and 18 contemporary artists. The exhibition is the first in The Gallery at No.1 Royal Crescent’s ambitious new programme of contemporary art exhibitions.
Focusing specifically on Thomas Gainsborough’s portraits of well-known, “liberated”, society women, Thomas Gainsborough and the Modern Woman draws us away from his predominant reputation as a landscape painter.
The four Gainsborough paintings are being presented as key components of a kaleidoscopic group exhibition of portraiture featuring 18 contemporary British artists selected by guest curator Ingrid Swenson MBE. The title for the exhibition, Being There is intended to invite visitors to reflect on the experience of artists and their sitters or subject in the act of making the artwork, and to consider what similarities and differences there may be for the role of the artist in Gainsborough’s time and today. Artists in Being There are Michael Armitage, Frank Auerbach, Sarah Ball, Richard Billingham, Glenn Brown, Brian Dawn Chalkley, Kaye Donachie, Paul Graham, Maggi Hambling, David Hockney, Claudette Johnson, Chantal Joffe, Lucy Jones, Joy Labinjo, Melanie Manchot, Celia Paul, Gillian Wearing, Shaqúelle Whyte
The Thomas Gainsborough portraits
The four portraits by artist Thomas Gainsborough, painted circa 1763, depict members of the prominent Tugwell family from Bradford on Avon: clothier Humphrey Tugwell, his wife, Elizabeth and sons William and Thomas.
It is exceptionally rare for a set of four portraits of members of the same family by Thomas Gainsborough to survive together. Rarer still is the fact that the sitters are not aristocratic visitors to fashionable Bath, but middle-class manufacturers from a small West Country town.
The suite of portraits is remarkable for capturing two generations of a wealthy, upwardly mobile manufacturing family. Few comparable sets of portraits by Gainsborough survive, making these pre-eminent depictions of middle-class sitters and ones with strong local significance to the story of Bradford on Avon.
These four portraits, housed in their original carved Carlo Maratta frames, must be seen in person to be fully appreciated!
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