In England in the 1640s, King Charles II had constructed the Mall at St. James’s Park: one of two long courts in the center of London on which to play pall mall, a croquet-like game. Today, the Mall is a broad avenue connecting Buckingham Palace through Admiralty Arch to Trafalgar Square. By the time Gainsborough painted this scene for King George III in the 1780s, the Mall was no longer used to play the game and had become a fashionable promenade. That is precisely what the painter shows here: groups of women strolling in splendid dresses and hats—and accompanied by their dogs—size up each other under the shade of bending trees lining the Mall. Cows, visible through the fence at left, provided milk for dairy drinks sold at the park.
Reminiscent of the dreamy fêtes galantes of the eighteenth-century French painter Antoine Watteau, Gainsborough’s Mall represents an actual place around the corner from Gainsborough’s home at Schomberg House and at the doorstep of the royal residence, which was then St. James’s Palace. The king ultimately rejected this painting. It apparently did not faithfully represent the Mall as it appeared in the 1780s. Gainsborough presents instead a more picturesque, fantastical place. The painting remained in Gainsborough’s studio until his death.
The Mall in St. James's Park
St. James’s Park was near Gainsborough’s London residence, Schomberg House, in Pall Mall. The long tree-lined avenue called the Mall, which runs south of St. James’s Palace, was a fashionable place for strolling in the eighteenth century. This composition is unusual among the artist’s later works and recalls, as several contemporary critics remarked, the fêtes galantes of Watteau. The feathery foliage and rhythmic design led one observer to describe the painting as “all aflutter, like a lady's fan.” Another reported that the artist composed the painting partly from dolls and a model of the park.
The large proportion of the canvas devoted to the setting testifies to Gainsborough’s abilities as a landscape painter and to his pioneering interest in the picturesque. Attempts to identify the ladies in the central group as the daughters of George III and the background figure under the tree at right as the artist himself are attractive but unsubstantiated.
Source: Art in The Frick Collection: Paintings, Sculpture, Decorative Arts, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996.
Mrs. Gainsborough. Elwin. Howe (or Home). George Frost, Ipswich. S.H. Kilderbee, Ipswich. His sale, May 30, 1829, Christie’s, Lot 126, sold for £183 15s to Bone. Neeld family, Grittleton House, near Chippenham, Wiltshire. The Hon. Mrs. C. Hanbury. Bought from her by Agnew in February, 1916. Duveen. Frick, 1916.
Source: Paintings in The Frick Collection: American, British, Dutch, Flemish and German. Volume I. New York: The Frick Collection, 1968.
