Focus on this artwork and discuss the Critical reception.
After it came to critical attention in 1927, the painting was initially a darling of the critics and art historians. Although Lord Duveen was still achieving huge prices for the later Grand Manner portraits he was selling to American plutocrats, critical taste was increasingly appreciative of Gainsborough's smaller and fresher early portraits. For Sir John Rothenstein in 1947 "there are few interpretations of civilized man in his relations with cultivated nature more lovely or psychologically profound", and other writers have developed the analysis of themes of fertility, abundance and interest in nature in the work. It was praised by Kenneth Clark in Landscape into Art (1949): "this enchanting work is painted with such love and mastery ...", which was in turn quoted scornfully by the Marxist art critic John Berger in his Ways of Seeing (1972) who went on to comment that Mr and Mrs Andrews are "not a couple in nature as Rousseau imagined nature. They are landowners and their proprietary attitude towards what surrounds them is visible in their stance and expressions."
Berger's brief remarks began a tradition of essentially hostile commentary in books on human geography and other parts of the humanities, that tend to treat normal features of historic portraiture as somewhat sinister, in a view emphasizing negative aspects of the English 18th century. By 2004 it was described as "a painting that has become so widely cited by human geographers that we feel it has become the one cultural artefact no self-respecting commentary on the practice of human geography can afford to ignore". According to another geographer: "Mr and Mrs Andrews, then, is an image on which geographers are agreed: it is a symptom of the capitalist property relations that legitimize and are sanctioned by the visual sweep of a landscape prospect".In this tradition, the expensive medium of oil-on-canvas itself and the lack of farm-workers in the image are cited as further evidence, and Mrs Andrews' somewhat stiff seated position is said to express her inferior and passive status, as she is placed on display like other assets of her husband. Harsh things are said about the appearance and facial expressions of the two sitters, their dress and poses, and Mr Andrews carrying a gun. To some authors in this tradition, Gainsborough's intention in making the portrait was in part satirical, something most art historians are unlikely to agree with.
In contrast, Andrew Graham-Dixon finds the painting "in its quiet, understated way, one of the masterpieces of erotic painting"; Robert's "clothes are almost falling off him, they are so loose and floppy" while Frances "has a melted, langourous look about her". For Erica Langmuir it is "the most tartly lyrical picture in the history of art. Mr Andrew's satisfaction in his well-kept farmlands is as nothing to the intensity of the painter's feeling for the gold and green of fields and copses, the supple curves of fertile land meeting the stately clouds". She notes the visual "rhymes and assonances" that link elements of the composition: the skirt with the bench's back, Mrs Andrews' shoes with its feet and Mr Andrews' with the tree roots, and "the lines of gun, thighs, dog, calf, coat". His hanging coat tail relates to the ribbon hanging from his wife's hat.
John Rothenstein Marxist human geography Rousseau art critic Andrew Graham-Dixon humanities John Berger Lord Duveen Ways of Seeing Kenneth Clark Grand Manner