Thomas Gainsborough (1727–88) uses landscape with as much insistence as Reynolds, but not in the same manner. His backgrounds are not so elaborately worked out, yet with all their slightness and sketchiness they are more imaginatively suggestive. It is, indeed, astonishing to perceive with how little reality of detail Gainsborough contrives to call up a vital impression of Nature in her most enchanting aspects. A still subtler source of charm rests in his power to fuse figures and landscape into an effect of perfect unity. The “Musidora” in the National Gallery is a picture before which, even in its present state, one could linger long in absorbed contemplation, without once mentally separating the figure and its surroundings. There is such a harmonious blending of lovely lines, of soft, rich hues, that the whole picture seems to have sprung from a single impulse. Sir Walter Armstrong says that in general Gainsborough’s landscape backgrounds “are nothing more than the extension over the unoccupied part of the canvas of the sentiment governing the sitter.”[582] Mr. Van Dyke points out the effect of the landscape in the famous portrait of “Mrs Graham,” where “the castle wall, the deep glen at the left, the loneliness of the background, add to the romance of her face.”[583] The portrait of Mrs. Robinson as “Perdita”[584] or that of “Mrs. Sheridan”[585] are even more convincing proofs of his ability to present a landscape inexplicably akin to the personality of the sitter, a landscape that in some indefinably but most real way interprets and emphasizes that personality. It is in full-length portraits of women whose beauty is enhanced by an air of pensive melancholy that this subtle use of landscape is mainly found. But in group portraits such as that of “Mrs Moody and her Children,” or, lovelier still, that of “Mrs. Sheridan and Mrs. Tickell,”[586] are landscape backgrounds every line and color of which serve to carry out and complete the grace and tenderness characteristic of the figures. In the “Squire Hallet and his Wife”[587] there is a harmony so penetrating that it haunts the mind like music. In “The Mall”[588] where there is no individual portraiture we seem at first to have but a Watteau-like effect of fashionably attired dames in a setting of rich park scenery. But presently we perceive that the whole picture conveys a sense of pathos. The ancient trees stretching up against the soft sky in immemorial majesty and beauty give to the onlooker a keen sense of the futile and evanescent life fluttering away its brief hour under their solemn and mysterious shadows.[589] [Illustration: SQUIRE HALLET AND HIS WIFE _By Thomas Gainsborough_]