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5. Impression. Judgement: the picture may be moving, lyrical, romantic, original, poetic in tone and atmosphere, an exquisite

piece of painting, an unsurpassed masterpiece, distinguished by a marvellous sense of colour and composition.

The picture may be dull, crude, chaotic, a colourless daub of paint, obscure and unintelligible, gaudy, depressing, disappoint ing,

cheap and vulgar.

1. Read the following text for obtaining its information:

Thomas Gainsborough was born in Sudbury, Suffolk, in 1727, the son of John Gainsborough, a cloth merchant. He soon evinced a

marked inclination for drawing and in 1740 his father sent him to London to study art. He stayed in London for eight years, working

under the rococo portrait-engraver Gravelot; he also became familiar with the Flemish tradition of painting, which was highly prized

by London art dealers at that time. "Road through Wood, with Boy Resting and Dog", 1747 is a typical 'genre painting', obviously in-

fluenced by Ruisdael. In Many aspects this work recalls Constable's "Cornfield".

In 1750 Gainsborough moved to Ipswich where his professional career began in earnest. He executed a great many small-sized

portraits as well as landscapes of a decorative nature. In October 1759 Gainsborough moved to Bath. In Bath he became a much

sought-after and fashionable artist, portraying the aristocracy, wealthy merchants, artists and men of letters. He no longer produced

small paintings but, in the manner of Van Dyck, turned to full-length, life-size portraits. From 1774 to 1788 (the year of his death)

Gainsborough lived in London where he divided his time between portraits and pictorial compositions, inspired by Geior- gione,

which Reynolds defined as "fancy pictures" ("The Wood Gatherers", 1787). As a self-taught artist, he did not make the traditional

grand tour or the ritual journey to Italy, but relied on his own remarkable instinct in painting.

Gainsborough is famous for the elegance of his portraits and his pictures of women in particular have an extreme delicacy and re-

finement. As a colourist he has had few rivals among English painters. His best works have those delicate brush strokes which are

found in Rubens and Renoir. They are painted in clear and transparent tone, in a colour scheme where blue and green predominate.

The particular discovery of Gainsborough was the creation of a form of art in which the sitters and the background merge into a

single entity. The landscape is not kept in the background, but in most cases man and nature are fused in a single whole through the

atmospheric harmony of mood; he emphasized that the natural background for his characters neither was, nor ought to be, the

drawing-room or a reconstruction of historical events, but the changeable and harmonious manifestations of nature, as revealed both

in the fleeting moment and in the slowly evolving seasons. In the portrait of "Robert Andrews and Mary, His Wife", for example, the

beauty of the green English summer is communicated to the viewer through the sense of well-being and delight which the at-