the search for gainsborough

i've starting reading the search for gainsborough by adrienne corri that i found at the strand a few months back. corri is (was?) a fairly successful theater and film actress and has published this book basically directly from her diaries. it's the mid seventies and she travel through britain on a tour of a production she's playing in -- and she happens upon a painting, in terrible condition, horribly disfigured, but investigates.
Corri takes it upon herself to clean it, assuming that it's a portrait of the great David Garrick by the -- even greater and more elusive -- Thomas Gainsborough.

As she travels through Europe, performing, filming, visiting family and friends (all of which is chronicled in her dairies, she is also restoring the painting -- and visiting with her friends (!) at the National Protrait Gallery, the Tate, the V&A, to get it looked over.

Anyway, I'm barely that far into it, but this book has propelled me back into desperate love with Gainsborough -- always my favorite mid-eighteenth century painter. Here are some more of his better-known works.

Just adding to the fascination with Gainsborough, though, is the fact that so very little is written about him. The Search for Gainsborough is, after all, no simple feat. I think it was maybe Constable who attempted to write a biography of Gainsborough a century after his death but was unable to finish it (could not even find the details of his birth!).

He was known to have a close relationship with David Garrick, but it also seems to be rather a mystery as to how the two could even have met. The chronologies of their lives rarely if ever cross, aside from his portraiture. Garrick, a very well-to-do Englishman and Gainsborough, pretty much an uncultured countryman -- that the two became friends is equally fascinating.

It's a great read. More soon.