We want to do a wedding invitation based on
'Mrs and Mrs Andrews' by Gainsborough.
We wanted to have all this random stuff in there and she was like, "of course you do".
I'm going to read something into this painting you're not expecting.
When you first see it.
it strikes you in one way,
but the more you get into it, it starts to strike you in all these other ways.
What's brewing beneath the surface here?
She looks almost like she has a secret that she wants to tell.
You can imagine him in 10 or 20 years' time,
he's going to be a rather overweight rake who drinks too much Port.
His life is already coming unravelled.
I love it.
Hi, I'm Waldemar Januszczak, I'm the art critic of the Sunday Times and occasional TV presenter.
Mr and Mrs Andrews is the quintessential view of the English countryside.
Particularly, I think, as imagined by foreigners.
You know, the kind of people who come over to England in the summer.
It's a beautiful sort of sunlit field with a lovely oak tree in the middle.
And this couple sitting there who at first
glance seem to seem to be an idyllic country couple.
I'm Christine Riding.
I'm the head of the Curatorial department
at the National Gallery and the Curator of British Paintings.
They are Robert Andrews and Frances Carter.
And the two of them are sitting in a parkland
with a view towards their estate near
Sudbury in Suffolk, which was brought together through their marriage.
So it is, in fact, a triple portrait of their estate and obviously of themselves.
Gainsborough was born in Sudbury, and knew
the area extremely well, and the sense that this is very much
evocative of the place, of a very particular place
is indicated really by these towers of the churches that you can see.
My name's Matthew Lawson.
I'm the Rector of Holy Trinity Church in Long Melford.
I'm Cheryl Collins, and I'm the priest-in-charge of All Saints Church in Sudbury.
And both of our churches have
the distinction of appearing in Mr and Mrs Andrews.
Obviously, as a vicar, I love the idea that the church is right
in the centre of the picture, which is where I think it belongs.
Many of the Gainsborough family are actually buried in All Saints churchyard.
There's the Gainsborough family mausoleum in the churchyard.
The oak tree in the painting is, in fact, still there.
And I think that's the landmark
that people who are interested in the painting go to look for.
I think the view is very typical of the English countryside.
Lots of church buildings, lots of small villages.
I think there is something rather nostalgic about seeing that then.
And you can actually almost taste what it's like when you visit
the Stour Valley now as well, because you look around and you'll see
those church towers just like they were then.
There is a quirkiness about it,
which has in many people's minds, come to represent English eccentricity.
I don't think it's that.
I just think there's something really fun about this painting.
I think it is,
it has quite a lot of tension in it.
My name is Phillipe Fenner and I'm an illustrator.
My name is Clare Doherty and our sales
coordinator for a brewery, and we based our wedding invitation on the painting.
We wanted to use it, but also give it a sense of humour,
taking something so extravagant, almost, and making it relatively everyday.
We thought that the people that would either
understand the reference, that would be really funny and be kind of cool in itself,
but that was a part of us that was, it would be even better
if people didn't understand the reference and people just thought,
that's how we saw ourselves.
So it was almost just as funny.
For starters the tricorn hat has absolutely no reference at all,
I just wanted to be wearing a tricorn hat.
I kind of wanted to keep the musket or the rifle in it,
Clare wasn't so keen, understandably.
The lamb is from my home town, Roscommon.
The fox is a reference to Leicester City,
who is my football team.
I love a floral.
So I was wearing kind of
a dress I had from being a bridesmaid, like a big long floral number.
Obviously Mr Andrews has got these kind of big garters.
So instead of doing that, we thought well we'll have football socks.
While it might not be the lands that we own, which is zero,
we did want to infuse the picture with kind of a sense of place
and ourselves, which I think was important to Mr and Mrs Andrews as well.
My name's David Evans. I'm a style blogger.
I've got a blog called Grey Fox blog, and this is one of my favourite paintings,
I think because of its Englishness and because of the style interest in it.
His undone coat and his slightly disheveled and yet incredibly smart look,
is actually quite contemporary.
You know, a lot of men nowadays, they try and aim for that
look where they might be wearing a suit.
but they're actually looking slightly disheveled.
And it's a very English look and still is,
it always has been. The sort of modern equivalent would be
the English landowner in the slightly battered tweed suits, you know,
with his rather smelly Labrador and rusty old Land Rover in the background.
My name is Thomas Eisner.
I am a member of the first violin section of the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
Mr Thomas Gainsborough,
well, we both have the same first name,
he is actually buried very close to where I live.
When I see this painting,
the piece of music that comes to mind is Mozart's D Minor Piano Concerto.
I mean, the very start of of that concerto is so sort of dark.
It's leading somewhere.
And I think the picture is leading somewhere.
And it sets all sorts of question marks.
Hi, this is Jeremy Vine.
I do like looking at this painting for all kinds of reasons.
I feel - and believe me, I don't know much about art -
it makes me react because I feel it's a bit like a cartoon.
I think the artist is trying to be a bit funny and a bit clever.
He wants me to lean in and I do because he
wants me to be interested in the story of these two.
Why is she wearing a fancy blue dress in the middle of the countryside?
Why is he carrying a gun? Is he expecting trouble?
Mr Andrews is fairly,
he's a typical nice-but-dim country type, he's leaning on his rifle.
He's been out hunting.
But Mrs Andrews, if you stop and look, she has got a really strange face.
There's a very peculiar expression on her.
It's a sort of mix of anger and spite and something else, I don't know.
It's a very, very strange expression.
I'm Adrianne Carter, also known as The Face Whisperer.
I'm an expert in body language and facial expressions.
When you look at her facial expressions,
that's when it really becomes interesting for me. That sideways look.
And then we look at the lower half of her face and what we see there is, just slightly,
what we would call the emotion of contempt.
And what that tells us is that she's
feeling some sort of scorn or disdain or maybe some disrespect.
It's a very distancing
emotion. It puts people off.
Hi, my name's Alex and I'm currently a Young Producer at the National Gallery.
She looks like she's sick of it a little bit.
She's looking at the painter,
but she's not looking directly at him. She looks almost like she has a secret.
If someone took a picture of me looking like that,
I think it would never see the light of day.
My name is Jennifer Bain.
I am an artist, also a visual arts teacher
at the secondary level in London, Ontario, Canada.
This half portrait, half landscape,
it draws me in because of the expression on Mrs Andrews' face.
That expression that's been interpreted
as, you know, this uptight, prim, proper, sort of smug smile.
And that's one way to see it.
To me,
I'm seeing that as this look of disdain for Mr Andrews.
We're supposed to be captivated by this
guy in his silk stockings.
And I'm not buying it.
Gainsborough is not buying it.
And I don't think Mrs Andrews is buying it either.
This is a look you know,
this is a look you can feel. This could be the face of quarantining with your spouse.
He looks to me like the sort of lad who didn't have many friends at school.
He's now pulled tops.
He's got this beautiful wife and he knows
- this is just my reading of it - that she's being unfaithful.
And to me, I'm going to read something into this painting
you're not expecting, that cloud,
that silver-lined cloud right in the middle of the sky
in the painting, represents her lover.
I think that's one of the great things
about great art, in a way, it's that we see in it
partly what we want to see.
I know this painting was done very early on in Thomas Gainsborough's career,
and I can't help wondering if there might have been a bit resentment.
Did Robert Andrews say, well, you know Thomas Gainsborough, you know this lad
I went to school with? He does a bit of painting.
I bet we could get him cheap.
The great portrait painters,
and Gainsborough was one of those if he was anything, are usually renowned because they
capture some of that inner fire,
the soul of a human being.
Well, I don't know if I want to know too much about the soul of
Mrs Andrews, certainly not in the way that Gainsborough has presented her.
If you were at a party and you know,
your friend was like, hey, can you take a picture of me?
If you like that friend, you will try to take the most flattering angle of them.
Gainsborough may have had some ulterior motive when he portrayed this couple.
Maybe he didn't really agree with this marriage.
The thing that a lot of people I think,
miss when they walk past the picture is that it's unfinished.
That in the middle of
Mrs Andrews' lap,
there is a gap where there ought to be something.
It's incredibly unusual to have a picture which is 98 percent complete.
And yet this is one lacuna in the middle,
this one place where there isn't something.
Once you do spot it,
it becomes this mind lock.
You know, why isn't there something there?
I don't know, is it a piece of paper or...
it's almost like the painter at some point had a laugh and gave up.
Maybe she wanted to be seen as someone clever, writing something.
I mean, it was probably left
I feel for a child, like eventually we'll paint in the first born child.
It's either a dead pheasant and she's clutching it by the tail or it's a hat.
I'm inclined to think it's the dead pheasant, the way it's been sort of caught,
is that a rumination upon the male-female
relationship by two blokes saying, well, now you're getting married,
you know, she'll have you by the pants.
Given that they all knew each other,
it's perfectly possible that there's some sort of gorgeous in-joke going on.
You know, there's something that only they are going to know about.
And it certainly has encouraged people to talk a lot about this painting.
So, you know, maybe this is a pretty savvy move.
You know, put something in
that's a little bit odd,
and then you'll get people for subsequent centuries
talking about, what is going on between those two?
Why does she look so fed up?
I mean you know, it's worked.
It's totally worked.