Gainsborough Dupont

b Sudbury, Suffolk, 24 Dec 1754; d London, 20 Jan 1797

English painter and engraver. He was the nephew of Thomas Gainsborough. On 14 January 1772 he entered his uncle’s studio, where he remained until 1788. The extent of their collaboration is uncertain, but a contemporary source states that they worked together on the dress in the portrait of Queen Charlotte (1781; Windsor Castle, Berks, Royal Col.); yet in this picture there appears to be no diminution of quality, and Dupont may have collaborated similarly in other works. Apart from working as a drapery painter, Dupont made mezzotints from his own reduced copies of Gainsborough’s late works and became thoroughly conversant with his master’s style. Indeed, such portraits as J. Phillips (1789; Southill Park, Beds) are stylistically very close to Gainsborough. Although Dupont’s technique was more frenetic, his palette more varied and his draughtsmanship weaker, scholars have only recently been able to separate Dupont’s work from that of his uncle. There is some evidence to suggest that, after Gainsborough’s death, patrons approached Dupont as the inheritor of his master’s distinctive style. He worked for the royal family and for William Pitt the younger, but his principal portrait works are a series of theatrical portraits (1793–5; many in London, Garrick Club) painted for Thomas Harris (d 1820), proprietor of the Covent Garden Theatre, and several full-length portraits commissioned by Trinity House, London, which include the huge canvas of the Elder Brethren of Trinity House (1793–5; London, Trinity House). However, his most artistically successful paintings were landscapes; these were also based on his uncle’s work (examples in New York, Brooklyn Mus.; Glasgow, A.G. & Mus.; Birmingham, Mus. & A.G.; Sudbury, Gainsborough’s House). The increasing agitation of his brushwork reveals his nervous character.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

J. Hayes: ‘The Trinity House Group Portrait’, Burl. Mag., cvi (1964), pp. 309–16

——: ‘Thomas Harris, Gainsborough Dupont and the Theatrical Gallery at Belmont’, Connoisseur, clxix (1968), pp. 221–7

——: The Landscape Paintings of Thomas Gainsborough, 2 vols (London, 1982)

HUGH BELSEY

© Oxford University Press 2006