Thomas Gainsborough and The Imagery of Passage

ABSTRACT

This study aims to look closely at the road in Gainsborough’s landscape paintings, and to establish what they may tell us about passage beyond their accepted recessional or structural role. The clarity of detail in these early landscapes enables us to speculate the likely forms of passage that are being enacted within the context of Gainsborough’s native county of Suffolk; thus isolating them from his later stylistic developments. Understanding the circumstances pertaining to Suffolk’s roads and their uses during the first half of the eighteenth century - how they looked and the volume of traffic they sustained - will inform this investigation.

Coming to terms with the actual historical, rural environment, and applying these findings to the fictional plasticity of the painted road, and the landscape through which it passes, will bring us closer to understanding how Gainsborough’s landscapes may have contributed to a more local process; a preoccupation that was concerned with movement through, or around a particular location. We will seek to establish how particular spatial areas, created through an illusionistic and fictional depth of field, together with the manner of representation, inform passage in a broader sense.