Ghosts of the 18th Century

I sit down now to write a few lines upon the magnificent painting that you can see below. It is the 1759 portrait of Thomas Gainsborough's daughters. Gainsborough, d. 1788, is quite the famous English painter of the Rococo style, and here he portrays his own daughters with such a paternal love and realism, that it feels as if one can just jump straight into the painting itself and converse with the subjects! When I behold portraits such as this from the 18th century, an era which forever haunts my mind (see here for more on the effects of this haunting!), it adds fire to the delusion in my heart that this time is ever on-going, instead of completely and irrevocably finished. For this history, in my mind, presents itself as a vibrant panoply of irresistible beauty, contradictory ethics, challenging legacies, and fecund life, the characters of which appear to me as alive as if they were standing right in front of me, the sounds echoing as bright as lightning bolts in the nighttime, I can near smell the petrichor in the air, and it feels so real that I almost believe that I could step foot onto the scene 300 years ago. However, I always have to pull myself away from the maw of delusion, reminding myself that the 18th century, and indeed all of history, is over, passed, done, dead. Indeed, it is a morbid thing to reflect upon the lives of Gainsborough's daughters, who here are depicted as youthful and full of life, but who in truth are turned to dust as is the case with every person who lived in that time. Beautiful art is apt to bring to mind such melancholic reflections, so I leave the art itself, for you my dear reader, to meditate upon, hoping that the cold beauty of eras past will haunt you as they continue to haunt me. May those ghosts never leave me.

⁂

Two Daughters, by Thomas Gainsborough, 1759.