The Unfinished: Gainsborough's 'Painter's Daughters with a Cat' and 'Mr and Mrs Andrews'

Excellent workshop at the National Gallery in a series on unfinished pictures focusing on works by Gainsborough.

We talked about why pictures, particularly by Gainsborough, were unfinished. I loved the story of a portrait of the actress Kitty Fisher by him which is unfinished as changed lovers so the original one who’d commissioned the picture no longer wanted it! The lecturer, Jacqui Ansell, is an expert on fashion so she was particularly interesting on when pictures were unfinished or changed because fashion changed while it was being painted.

We spent a long time in the gallery with four pictures (Mr and Mrs Andrews, a self-portrait with his wife and a child and two of his two daughters)  taking a close look and thinking about what areas weren’t finished or were changed. We also talked about the idea of the finish of a picture and talked about how Gainsborough’s pictures took on a looser less finished look as he got older and more popular. Less finish means more speed!

We headed back up to the seminar room to talk about some of the ideas which had arisen from looking at the pictures such as what the unfinished patch on Mrs Andrew’s lap was for. Why was it unfinished? Was it a space left for a baby? What about a piece of sewing? Or how about a dead pheasant as he’s armed with a gun?

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