Tate Britain celebrates one of Britain's most famous portrait painters.

Gainsborough at Tate Britain

(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

Watch the whole programme - 25 October 2002

KIRSTY WARK:
Come on, Paul, you would like to be painted by Gainsborough?

PAUL MORLEY:
I would. I wasn't looking forward to the exhibition and at the beginning I wandered around thinking "I hate Gainsborough", because of received myth. There are some really bad pictures, but I started to notice how many of them needed careful decoding and were subtle, and sexy.

The one that turned me was William Poyntz. The symbolism is obvious: he has a huge gun sticking out of his groin representing sexiness and machismo. The wonderful way his legs cross to represent gentlemanly ease. I will of course take that up.

I was stupid to believe that it was chocolate box - it was incredibly ravaging and sexy. It is the equivalent of OK Magazine or Andy Warhol. He had access to the famous, the rich, the sexy and the privileged and they are represented in a completely ravishing way.

JEANETTE WINTERSON:
It's a marvellous exhibition. It's a triumph of curatorship in that it is scholarly, sexy, exciting and well-informed. It's set in six rooms so it is like going through a Georgian house with interconnecting rooms. It has a domestic and intimate feel which is at odds with the grand feel of the exhibition.

If you question whether art can continue to interest us long after contemporary interest in the subject matter has died, the answer is yes. We don't know these people, but we want to know them and we long for them. The landscapes are not quite as arresting.

ROSIE BOYCOTT:
Some of the landscapes are truly awful. I thought the portraits were wonderful. Like Mario Testino, everybody wanted to be photographed by him and it was sexy and exciting.

But there came a time when the upper classes and the aristocracy started to think, well, let's think kindly about the poor, we should have sensibility. There is a truly awful painting, Cottage Girl With Dog, showing a peasant girl carrying a dog and she's sweet and it's the sort of thing you see on a Boots Christmas card.

This man had a great eye for people and understood publicity. He painted the Ligonier couple, who were having a hot, society divorce, so fast that Lady Ligonier's dress wasn't finished because he wanted to get the pictures up while the divorce was going on!

PAUL MORLEY:
The point about the self-promotion is interesting, because he actually fancied himself doing the landscapes. When he painted James Christy of the auction house, he puts his own landscape in the painting to say, "I actually do this as well", which I think is fantastically modern

KIRSTY WARK:
The memorable thing is the gaze, as in the The Linley Sisters. The gaze is so direct and he had a completely different attitude towards women and their intellectual life, which was hitherto not accepted, not even by Reynolds.

JEANETTE WINTERSON:
Exactly. One of the things he did was to transform ordinary subjects into something much grander. The same thing Wordsworth was to do later with The Prelude, taking the ordinary facts of a human being's life and saying this is the stuff of history and grand gesture.