| Mr and Mrs William Hallett | |
|---|---|
| The Morning Walk | |
 | |
| Artist | Thomas Gainsborough |
| Year | 1785 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 236.2 cm× 179.1 cm(93.0 in× 70.5 in) |
| Location | National Gallery, London |
Mr and Mrs William Hallett (or The Morning Walk) is a 1785 oil on canvas painting by the British painter Thomas Gainsborough, and is now in the collection of the National Gallery in London (NG 6209). [1]
Gainsborough painted the work in the summer of 1785, when the subjects, William Hallett (1764–1842) and Elizabeth Stephen (1763/4-1833) were both aged 21, shortly before their wedding at the church of St Lawrence in Little Stanmore on 30 July 1785. Gainsborough was commissioned by Hallett, and paid 120 guineas (£126).
Hallett was the grandson of a successful cabinetmaker, also named William Hallett, and inherited his estate at Canons Park in Middlesex. Stephen was an heiress, inheriting nearly £20,000 from her father, a surgeon, who had died before the marriage. The couple never lived at Canons Park: by 1788, Hallett had let Canons and had bought the estate of Little Wittenham in Berkshire, but they resided at Faringdon House in Oxfordshire for almost 20 years. Hallett was a gambler, lost money in business transactions, and worked his way through his fortune by 1830, although the marriage was reportedly a happy one. They were married for almost 48 years, with two sons and four daughters. Hallett remarried after Elizabeth's death in 1833.
After his death in 1842, William was buried next to Elizabeth in the churchyard of the church where they had been married decades before.
The couple are captured with the typical feathery brushwork of Gainsborough's late career, walking arm in arm along a path through some woods, accompanied by a Pomeranian sheepdog (then commonly known from its head shape as a "fox dog", more closely related to the German Spitz or the Samoyed dog than the much smaller modern Pomeranian dog) . The couple may be wearing their wedding clothes, with Elizabeth in a gown of billowing ivory silk with lace cuffs, gathered at the waist with black silk, with a green ribbon tied at the breast echoed by the large green bow tied around a wide-brimmed black hat topped by ostrich plumes. William is wearing a black velvet frock coat, with large gold buttons and a green and yellow waistcoat; black breeches, white stockings, and buckled shoes; and carrying a plain black hat.
After Mrs Hallett's death the painting was offered for sale at Foster's in 1834, though it remained unsold. Hallett bequeathed it to his daughter Lettice Elizabeth, who was married to Nash Crosier Hilliard (son of the MP Edward Hilliard). It was inherited by their son William Edward Hilliard and included in the Gainsborough exhibition at the British Institution in 1859, when it was lauded in The Times as a "perfect realisation of youthful elegance and high breeding", and in the 1862 International Exhibition.
In April 1884 it was sold from the estate of the sitters' grandson William Edward Hilliard to Agnew's, who sold it on, eight days later, to Sir N. M. Rothschild (later Lord Rothschild). The painting was acquired for the National Gallery in 1954, from the collection of Lord Rothschild, for £30,000, the Art Fund providing a grant of £5000 towards the purchase price. [2]
On 18 March 2017, the painting was attacked by a man with a sharp object. [3] [4] The painting received two scratches of about 1 m (3 ft 3 in) and 65 cm (2 ft 2 in) long in the incident, crossing in the lower half of the figure of Mrs Hallett, but the canvas was not pierced. [5] After 10 days of restoration, the painting went back on display. [5]
Gainsborough's composition was the inspiration for George Romney's portrait of Sir Christopher and Lady Sykes, known as The Evening Walk, still at the Sykes family's house, Sledmere House. [6]
Thomas Gainsborough was an English portrait and landscape painter, draughtsman, and printmaker. Along with his rival Sir Joshua Reynolds, he is considered one of the most important British artists of the second half of the 18th century. He painted quickly, and the works of his maturity are characterised by a light palette and easy strokes. Despite being a prolific portrait painter, Gainsborough gained greater satisfaction from his landscapes. He is credited as the originator of the 18th-century British landscape school. Gainsborough was a founding member of the Royal Academy.
The Pomeranian is a breed of dog of the Spitz type that is named for the Pomerania region in north-west Poland and north-east Germany in Central Europe. Classed as a toy dog breed because of its small size, the Pomeranian is descended from larger Spitz-type dogs, specifically the German Spitz.
George Stubbs was an English painter, best known for his paintings of horses. Self-trained, Stubbs learnt his skills independently from other great artists of the 18th century such as Reynolds and Gainsborough. Stubbs' output includes history paintings, but his greatest skill was in painting animals, perhaps influenced by his love and study of anatomy. His series of paintings on the theme of a lion attacking a horse are early and significant examples of the Romantic movement that emerged in the late 18th century. He enjoyed royal patronage. His painting Whistlejacket hangs in the National Gallery, London.
English art is the body of visual arts made in England. England has Europe's earliest and northernmost ice-age cave art. Prehistoric art in England largely corresponds with art made elsewhere in contemporary Britain, but early medieval Anglo-Saxon art saw the development of a distinctly English style, and English art continued thereafter to have a distinct character. English art made after the formation in 1707 of the Kingdom of Great Britain may be regarded in most respects simultaneously as art of the United Kingdom.
John Frederick Sackville, 3rd Duke of Dorset, KG was the only son of Lord John Philip Sackville, second son of Lionel Sackville, 1st Duke of Dorset. His mother was the former Lady Frances Leveson-Gower. He succeeded to the dukedom in 1769 on the death of his uncle, Charles Sackville, 2nd Duke of Dorset. He was the British Ambassador to France from 1784 and returned to England in August 1789 following the escalation of the French Revolution.
Events from the year 1785 in art.
Mr and Mrs Andrews is an oil on canvas portrait of about 1750 by Thomas Gainsborough, now in the National Gallery, London. Today it is one of his most famous works, but it remained in the family of the sitters until 1960 and was very little known before it appeared in an exhibition in Ipswich in 1927, after which it was regularly requested for other exhibitions in Britain and abroad, and praised by critics for its charm and freshness. By the post-war years its iconic status was established, and it was one of four paintings chosen to represent British art in an exhibition in Paris celebrating the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. Soon the painting began to receive hostile scrutiny as a paradigm of the paternalist and capitalist society of 18th-century England, but it remains a firm popular favourite.
Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy is a 1971 painting by the British artist David Hockney. Painted between 1970 and 1971, it depicts the fashion designer Ossie Clark and the textile designer Celia Birtwell in their flat in Notting Hill Gate shortly after their wedding, with one of the couple's cats on Clark's knee. The white cat depicted in the painting was Blanche; Percy was another of their cats, but Hockney thought "Percy" made a better title.
Marcus Gheeraerts was a Flemish artist working at the Tudor court, described as "the most important artist of quality to work in England in large-scale between Eworth and van Dyck" He was brought to England as a child by his father Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder, also a painter. He became a fashionable portraitist in the last decade of the reign of Elizabeth I under the patronage of her champion and pageant-master Sir Henry Lee. He introduced a new aesthetic in English court painting that captured the essence of a sitter through close observation. He became a favorite portraitist of James I's queen Anne of Denmark, but fell out of fashion in the late 1610s.
Pinkie is the traditional title for a portrait made in 1794 by Thomas Lawrence in the permanent collection of the Huntington Library at San Marino, California where it normally hangs opposite The Blue Boy by Thomas Gainsborough. The title now given it by the museum is Sarah Goodin Barrett Moulton: "Pinkie". These two works are the centerpieces of the institution's art collection, which has notable holdings of eighteenth-century British portraiture. The painting is an elegant depiction of Sarah Moulton (1783–1795), who was about eleven years old when painted. Her direct gaze and the loose, energetic brushwork give the portrait a lively immediacy.
Jassy is a 1947 British colour film historical melodrama set in the early 19th century, based on a novel by Norah Lofts. It is a Gainsborough melodrama, the only one to be made in Technicolor. It was the last "official" Gainsborough melodrama.
Susan Hannah Eakins was an American painter and photographer. Her works were first shown at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where she was a student. She won the Mary Smith Prize there in 1879 and the Charles Toppan prize in 1882.
George Finch-Hatton Esq FRS was an English politician who sat in the House of Commons from 1772 to 1784.
Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1787) is an oil on canvas portrait painted by Thomas Gainsborough between 1785 and 1787. It was acquired by the National Gallery of Art in 1937. Mrs. Sheridan was a talented musician who enjoyed professional success in Bath and London before marrying Richard Brinsley Sheridan in 1773 and abandoning her career. She was 31-33 when she sat for Gainsborough, dying from tuberculosis seven years later at the age of thirty-eight. The portrait was painted between 1785 and 1787, and, was exhibited at Gainsborough's studio at Schomberg House, Pall Mall in 1786.
Portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire is a portrait painting by the English painter Thomas Gainsborough of the political hostess Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire. It was painted between 1785 and 1787.
Richard Phelps (1710–1785) was an 18th-century English portrait painter and designer. He painted portraits of gentry, a number of which are in the National Trust, Dunster Castle, University of Oxford, National Portrait Gallery, London, and other museums. The British Museum has an album of 312 of his drawings. Phelps was also a landscape designer, who was hired by Henry Fownes Luttrell to update the grounds of Dunster Castle.
Courtyard with an Arbour (1658–1660) is an oil-on-canvas painting by the Dutch painter Pieter de Hooch; it is now in a private collection. It was sold in 1992 for almost seven million dollars.
The pendant portraits of Maerten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit are a pair of full-length wedding portraits by Rembrandt. They were painted on the occasion of the marriage of Maerten Soolmans and Oopjen Coppit in 1634. Formerly owned by the Rothschild family, they became jointly owned by the Louvre Museum and the Rijksmuseum in 2015 after both museums managed to contribute half of the purchase price of €160 million, a record for works by Rembrandt.
Portrait of Anne, Countess of Chesterfield is a large oil-on-canvas painting by the English portrait and landscape artist Thomas Gainsborough, completed between 1777 and 1778. It shows Anne Stanhope, wife of Philip Stanhope, 5th Earl of Chesterfield, sitting in a blue and while satin dress, sitting in a garden, and is one of the best known of Gainsborough's many portraits of English aristocrats.
Frances Caroline Fairman was a British watercolourist, a painter in oils, and an illustrator. In her lifetime she was best known for her canine portraits, some of which were commissioned by royalty and aristocracy. She was known as "the Lady Landseer" for the quality of her work. She travelled to the Americas, France, and Switzerland, returning with watercolour landscape sketches.
Media related to The Morning Walk (Gainsborough) at Wikimedia Commons
 | This article about an eighteenth-century painting is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |