Month: January 2026

It took me some time to cross the South Circular, a vicious road which hurtles from its junction with the North Circular and the M4 at Chiswick, across the Thames via Kew Bridge, and south through Kew and Putney, before veering on a wild course east through Clapham, Dulwich, and Lewisham, to end at the Woolwich ferry. In what was once the hamlet of Kew it severs Kew Green in two, leaving Saint Anne’s church, which originally sat in the centre of the green, stranded in the western half. Saint Anne’s was built in 1714 as a chapel of ease and has been extended several times, but my purpose in manoeuvring across the A205 was not to see the church but the raised churchyard which surrounds it on three sides, and in particular the graves of two eighteenth century painters: Gainsborough and Zoffany.

Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) and Johan Zoffany (1733-1810), both founder members of the Royal Academy, were phenomenally successful in their lifetimes. They had little else in common, apart from fortuitously ending up in the same burial ground: Gainsborough had requested burial there to be close to his friend and fellow artist Joshua Kirby, and Zoffany was resident in the parish, living on the opposite side of the river at Strand on the Green. In Britain Gainsborough’s star has never faded, but Zoffany’s reputation has been more inclined to fluctuation.

Born in Sudbury, in Suffolk, Gainsborough studied art in London. On his return to Ipswich, he enjoyed a very modest success with his landscapes and small head portraits of local merchants and squires. Only when he moved to Bath in 1759 did his fame and popularity grow, resulting in lucrative commissions from a stylish clientele in the fashionable spa town. His portraits became larger with life-size, full-length paintings of prominent social figures: actors, playwrights, musicians, and aristocrats.

But Gainsborough was inclined to be cantankerous, and he was soon complaining that he was “sick of portraits” and yearned to indulge his real passion for “landskips.” (sic)

After settling in London in 1774, he began to integrate his sitters into landscapes. And gradually the figures shifted to the margins until, in his later years, the sitters disappeared entirely, and he returned to the pure landscapes which gave him most satisfaction. Oddly, unlike his youthful works, these were rarely painted from nature but completed at night by candlelight with model landscapes set up in his studio, using stones, twigs, leaves, and mirrors.

And in the Victoria and Albert museum is his strange “showbox”: sometimes Gainsborough painted landscapes with oils on glass, and backlit them with candles in the dark box to be viewed through a magnifying lens.

Gainsborough is credited as a founder member of the British landscape school, and, with Reynolds, as the dominant British portraitist of the late eighteenth century. But I have never been able to summon much enthusiasm for his work. Faced with grey powdered wigs, elaborate fussy hats and dresses, the stiff poses of his sitters, combined with the sludgy colours of the landscapes, I generally find the dogs the most attractive components of the portraits. And when, as with the famous Blue Boy, Gainsborough’s work reveals the influence of Van Dyck in both costume and technique, I find the effect positively weird.

Zoffany’s work is so much more fun: a merry-go-round of swirling colours; wry, risqué, full of satirical allusion. And his life was as flamboyant as his paintings. Of Hungarian and Bohemian origins, he was born in Frankfurt and when he was seventeen, he walked to Rome to study art. Ten years later he was in England where David Garrick became his first major patron. His depictions of Garrick both in his theatrical performances and with his family secured Zoffany’s fame. Like Gainsborough he was in demand for portraits of actors, musicians, scientists, and society. In 1764 he was taken up as a court painter, joining the expatriate German community around George III and Queen Charlotte.

He combined the exuberance of his painting with a meticulous attention to detail. Commenting on the latter, the art critic Christopher Hussey described him as “the Jane Austen of English painting,” which is apposite only so long as it applies only to his representation of teacups and saucers.

Zoffany espoused the genre of conversation pieces, adapting it specifically to produce theatrical conversation pieces, filling his huge canvasses with large casts of instantly recognisable actors.

Similarly, in The Academicians of the Royal Academy, artists jostled with models and works of art. At the request of the Royal household, he worked for five years on the Tribuna of the Uffizi, but here he came to grief for the bigoted and prudish Charlotte was shocked to recognise two notorious “finger twirlers”, a derogatory term for homosexual men, in the crowded gallery. There were no more Commissions from Charlotte.

Unperturbed Zoffany set out for India, the paintings he produced there providing a wonderful insight into what William Dalrymple has described as the intermixing and mingling of people, culture and ideas in eighteenth century India before racial prejudices, arrogant imperial policies, and an ugly desire for British control swept all this away in the nineteenth century. Dalrymple uses a detail from Zoffany’s General William Palmer and Family for the cover of his book White Mughals; in the painting Palmer and his wife, the Mughal Princess, Bibi Faiz Bakhsh appear with their children and her sisters. In Colonel Mordaunt’s Cock Match, Zoffany portrays a fight between the prize cockerel of the royal family of Awadh and that owned by East India Company men, a painting in which he and his friends also featured.

He painted an altar piece of the Last Supper for Saint John’s church in Kolkata, using local merchants as models for the apostles, a Greek Orthodox priest as a model for Jesus and, more controversially, the Police Magistrate Blaquiere for Saint John. Blaquiere who had feminine good looks and enjoyed cross dressing, had frequently used female disguise in successfully apprehending bandits, but he was unpopular with some Europeans because of his indifference to Christianity and his sympathy for local religions and customs. It was however Zoffany’s modelling of Judas on William Tulloh, an auctioneer with whom he had fallen out, which landed him with a lawsuit.

As he sailed back to England, Zoffany was shipwrecked off the Andaman Islands. Dalrymple comments drily,

Lots having been drawn among the starving survivors, a young sailor was duly eaten. Zoffany may thus be said with some confidence to have been the first and last Royal Academician to become a cannibal. *

Back in England Zoffany produced a second notorious altarpiece featuring the Last Supper, this a commission from Saint Anne’s at Kew. He used fishermen from Strand on the Green as models for the disciples, modelled Peter on himself and John on his wife. Again, it was Judas who landed him in trouble; he had modelled the latter on his lawyer, who was also a churchwarden at Saint Anne’s. The church authorities refused to pay for the finished work, and he donated it instead to Saint George’s church in Brentford.

In search of the altarpiece, I crossed Kew Bridge and made for Brentford High Street, but Saint George’s had closed, being converted first into a music museum in 1963, and then, after a period of dereliction, and a delay owing to the discovery of graves under the nave, into “an exciting new gated development” with “upscale serviced apartments” in 2017. The altarpiece had been moved to Saint Paul’s, also in Brentford, where it has been relegated to a position high on the wall of a side chapel. And although I am amused by the story of its provenance, I have to admit that it is a very disappointing work. Sadly, I too would have consigned it to a dark corner.

But I found consolation in an excellent coffee and cake in the very welcoming Spire Café in Saint Paul’s church. Highly recommended should you find yourself in Brentford.

*William Dalrymple, White Mughals, (2002) p. 268