The Incredible Story Behind Mr and Mrs Andrews (Waldemar Januszczak Documentary) | Perspective

[Music] so the english countryside is a deceptive terrain it looks so sweet so friendly so innocent but it's none of those things anyone who's listened to a few episodes of the archers will already know that dark stuff happens in the english countryside sharp of tooth red of claw it's a deadly battleground the great english painter thomas gainsborough certainly knew this he was a country boy born and bred a suffolk lad gainsborough recognized that beneath the deceptively innocent surfaces of outdoor england unpleasantness was thriving lives were being ruined greed was being shown voila gainsborough's masterpiece of outdoor englishness his famous double portrait of mr and mrs andrews summer corn glistening in the sun fluffy clouds scudding across the sky english oaks dotting the horizon and sitting in front of it all like a pair of giant spiders in the middle of a web mr and mrs andrews him with his big gun and his nonchalance she with the most puzzlingly unpleasant expression in the whole of gainsborough's art [Music] if this woman invited me up to spend the weekend at her big country house i don't think i'd accept something's going on here it's a pretty scene it's merry england but something's going on here [Music] this is gainsborough's town sudbury in suffolk where mr andrews and probably went to school together it's a tea and cakes town these days somewhere ye oldie on the tourist circuit but when gainesboro was born here in 1727 this was a real slab of rural england a cloth town in serious decline daniel defect came and visited sudbury quite early on in the century and thought that it was a very very poor place and with one or two rich people and all the poor people were willing the rich ones he said so it was quite a depressed town and sudbury has always been an earthy little working town and its main industry has been weaving and indeed the gainsborough family were concerned with that not only against his father but also his very much more successfully his uncle but it was quite a shaky business i think they made velvet here wool of course sudbury surrounded by sheep and interestingly silk this is gainsborough's garden and this beautiful old survivor is a mulberry tree planted here in 1610. it would have been handy for the gainsboroughs to have a mulberry tree in the garden because mulberry trees are what silk worms feed on and the gainsboroughs were in the cloth trade gainsborough's father was a trader in fine materials and so in a way was his son if you ever get a chance to examine closely a portrait by gainsborough in his prime have a good look at the clothes they're wearing the silks the satins the brocades the lace he had a genius for painting precious fabrics he knew about them from birth and loved them dizzily i think [Music] picture after picture by gainsborough at his best is a glorious advert for his father's calling even mrs andrews the baddie in this picture gets an outfit to die for pale blue silk in an outrageous expanse not what you'd usually wear if you're out killing pheasants [Music] i get the feeling in a lot of gainsborough's pictures that he liked the clothes more than he liked the people wearing them he was notoriously unimpressed by his sitters when he was painting sarah siddons the most celebrated actress of her times the elizabeth hurley of the georgian age he suddenly exploded damn your nose there's no end to it and behind the backs of his sitters he was even more scathing yes he he was known to complain about his sitters um but i think being a portraitist is really a considerable problem that you have all these people who by definition want to look better than they probably do and that having that day in day out of about eight people a day must be a considerable problem and most portraitists got very very bored with self-important people rushing through their studio all day gainesboro hated doing fashionable portraits the cursed face business he called it his tragedy was he was so damn good at it they only have one part worth looking at said gainsborough of the fashionable types he painted and that is their purse so he sniffed the air and headed for where the biggest purses were gathered he moved to bath where all the celebrities of george and england would visit to take the waters and to have their likeness done by thomas gainsborough the mario testino of his age he ended up in london naturally the most fashionable portrait painter in england who was usually forgiven his little rudenesses because he captured a likeness better than anyone else he had the gift all right gainsborough had the fastest hands of any painter this country's ever produced he painted like an expert swordsman and the rich have always been able to take a bit of rudeness from their artists in return for some breathtaking immortality he realized that he had to cover a vast amount of canvas in order to compete with people there are one or two records of head and shoulder portraits which he completed in one hour 40 minutes and that is going at sensational speed there's records of him getting drunk for a fortnight and then doing a skirt of a great full-length portrait in the night so i think he used that speed to good effect so that he could get drunk for a full night and also so that he could get through the acreage of canvas and compete in a real way gainesboro was the youngest of nine children his father the cloth merchant fell on hard times and was bankrupt young thomas wasn't going to enter the cloth business he had another talent art and according to a story which i don't quite believe but i'll tell you anyway when he was a boy he saw a man trying to steal pears from his garden and drew him so convincingly that the neighbors recognized this scoundrel immediately and nabbed him young gainsborough was also naughty another story which i do believe is that he used to forge his own sick notes for school and captured his parents handwriting perfectly from his days of forging sick notes at school and throughout his life gainsborough was a subtle subversive always doing things on the sly at the age of 18 he got married in secret to the illegitimate daughter of a duke he'd got her pregnant she brought in 200 pounds a year which was very useful and which gainsborough began to supplement busily by painting some of the most memorable portraits in british art [Music] this is the house the gainsborough's lived in it's an estate agents now and no one seems to know what went on in which room but it could be that this is the spot in which gainsborough painted mr and mrs andrews these days the picture hangs in the national gallery and is famous the world over as gainesboro's earliest masterpiece but until 50 years ago no one outside the andrews family even knew it existed the national gallery didn't buy it until 1960. so here's an interesting question why was this painting kept so secret for so long [Music] andrews inherited half of the estate from his father aubry's it was called his wife brought in the other half when they married in 1748 so although it wasn't strictly speaking a marriage of convenience it was certainly a most convenient marriage which left both of them twice as rich as they had been so far so normal here are two small town moneybags celebrating the union of two big time purses but something went wrong in the making of this much moneyed wedding portrait i often watch people walking past this entertaining picture and enjoy it a lot but it's amazing how often they miss two crucial things about it one is how frightening mrs andrews is but the second is that it's unfinished if you look closely at that brown splodge in the middle of her lap something's missing the picture is incomplete gainsborough never had his final say in this painting he meant to show something here but never did what was it and why did he never put it there [Music] why is mr and mrs andrews unfinished these are the questions that need to be asked here you have a painting that's famous the world over as the perfect image of rural england but just as paradise had a snake in it so mrs andrews had on her lap something that never got painted something that someone somewhere didn't want us to see and i'm sure i know what it is the single most aggressive and destructive act ever perpetrated by the government of britain on its rural folk was the long and drawn-out passing of the enclosure acts which took the common land away from the people the defense around it and gave it to the landlords it was unforgivable it ruined the livings of so many country people gainsborough's heart always went out to them the poor had his sympathy not the rich and the landed like mr and mrs robert andrews this is the exact spot on which gainsborough painted his wonderful picture you must recognize that oak behind me this big fat english oak which is exactly the same tree although it's thicker now than it was before and over there of course is that beautiful slab of the english countryside which is behind mr and mrs andrews in the picture still i think really recognizable now mr andrews is standing just about here he's been out hunting so he's holding his shooting rifle nonchalantly under his arm mrs andrews she's sitting here demurely with her legs crossed now i've seen this picture so many times in the national gallery but it wasn't until i came here and stood in this spot that i realized something incredibly interesting about it which is that behind gainesboro in the painting hidden from sight is the house in which mr and mrs andrews actually lived now that's significant not just because you didn't know it was there in the painting but also because it explains one of the great mysteries of mr and mrs andrews which is why she is dressed in this flamboyant outfit of flowing pale blue silk while he is wearing his scruffy shooting gear obviously what's happened is that he's been out doing the shooting while she has been waiting for him indoors and has now come out to meet him just a few hundred feet away from the house to sit on his bench the biggest change in the landscape of course is this huge row of trees behind me there's a forest down there now that isn't in the gainsborough picture now that was planted deliberately by one of the later owners of the house apparently they built a council estate at the bottom of the hill so the owner decided to try and mask it and he planted this huge forest in between it and him the corn is gone of course it's all been grassed over now but if you look carefully you can actually still see the echoes of these furrows there's little bits of them left and what's interesting about the furrows is that they're what's left over from this revolutionary new use of an implement called the seed drill now this seed drill was the very latest in agrarian technology it made harvesting the corn so much easier and mr andrews was very proud of being a pioneer in its use the sea drill wasn't widely taken up initially wealthy landowners are keen to use it as it was a public demonstration of how wealthy and how advanced they were it wasn't received widely uh by the majority especially the farm workers in fact they could see with this change with mechanization coming in that actually their jobs would be a threat mr and mrs andrews these newlyweds are showing off the fruit of their union their land and their agricultural progressiveness of course there isn't a peasant in sight and none of this was achieved by these two getting their hands dirty in any way what a painting shows to me is the importance of the new farming methods to him and there's a real statement that he's actually you know a very wealthy powerful landowner and really accepting all these new ideas and it's sort of really look at me i'm so you know really ahead of the game people say that gainsborough was having a go at the rural rich in this picture i think that's right he was these are greedy people they've snatched the land away from its rightful owners and they're parading themselves in front of it while gainsborough disapproves but there's something else going on here something more personal if gainsborough really did go to school with mr andrews i think he rather liked him mr andrews is sympathetically painted he's dim but nice lounging around on his land with his gun and his dog it's mrs andrews who worries me she's surely one of the least attractive women in gainsborough's art uptight clinched stiff she's only a teenager 18 years old but she already has the demeanor of a middle-aged rural harridan and what is that on her lap that unfinished blob of canvas i think there's only one thing it can be that must be a feather the tail feather of a pheasant eye warrant and the rest of the bird is sitting on her knee he's been out hunting he's brought the bird back she's got it on her lap on a cloth so that it doesn't bleed into her beautiful blue dress but if there is a pheasant what's it doing there is the dead bird an innocent avian corpse brought back from the morning's hunt and no more or does it have another meaning a deeper one a symbolic one gainsborough was a great admirer of dutch art and in dutch art you often find women winches shop girls wives holding up dead birds snipe duck look at this buxom butcher's maid how fiercely she clutches that look at her unsmiling determination does it remind you of anyone [Music] fact is that most dead birds in dutch art represent a man who's fallen into the clutches of a determined woman and been plucked [Music] the bird in the hand of a buxom dutch woman is invariably intended as a warning to us guys not to let ourselves be grabbed where it hurts and all the naughty doubler antons involving the word are entirely intentional gainsborough a country man would have known all about these low country readings and he would i suggest have been after just such a doubler on taunt in his picture before it was censored i think that he didn't like mrs andrews much that he was warning mr andrews of the fate of the pheasant that's fallen into her lap and been grabbed just before this picture was finished i think its secret meaning was spotted and that mrs andrews realized all too clearly how unflattering a portrait of her was being painted here [Music] the picture was never finished because the sitters finally realized what gainsborough was saying about them and didn't like it [Music] ah yes the english countryside the corn in the field the larks in the sky and the poison in the hearts of the people [Music] mr and mrs andrews is a great masterpiece of gainsborough's early work but if only he'd been allowed to complete it it would have been greater still there are a million stories in the world of art this has been just one of them

Channel: Perspective

Views: 53,399

Keywords: Arts, The Arts, Theatre, Music, Full EPisode, Full documentary, documentary, performing arts, history documentary, european art, waldemar, thomas gainsborough, mr and mrs andrews, documentary history, waldemar januszczak, art history, art documentary, art history documentary, waldemar januszczak documentary, documentary movies - topic, waldemar perspective, every picture tells a story, art critic

Id: O5D64kKtb7Y

Length: 22min 34sec (1354 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 22 2020