Page 25 - Francis Cotes - A winning end-game

Fig 7. ARTHUR DEVIS, Mr and Mrs Atherton, Walker
Art Gallery, Liverpool.
ahead, or Mr and Mrs Hill, ( Mellon Coll,
Yale), where the rotund master stands firmly
astride, and his wife sits calmly in front of her
tea-service.3 Such paintings convey not only
the sitters likeness, but their adherence to a
conventional view of marriage, where the
husband is the superior being, and the wife his
dutiful inferior. This view persisted in many
cases until late into the century and beyond. It
is implied in Gainsborough’s early painting of
Mr and Mrs Andrews, set against the prospect
of his lands, and a slight resonance endures even
3. Kate Redford, in The Art of Domestic Life (2006), offers an
interesting study of changing social attitudes and pictorial
approaches.
Fig 8. THOMAS ,GAINSBOROUGH Mr and Mrs William
Hallett, (The Morning Walk), London, National Gallery.
in his charming, intimate scene of Mr and Mrs
Hallett: The Morning Walk (Fig. 8. National
Gallery, London), of 1785, where the couple
are so close, yet the husband still leads the way,
a variation on the many promenade portraits of
the era. But while it is too simple to deduce
widespread shifts in social attitudes from portraits
alone, it is also the case that from the mid-1750s
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