(click to enlarge) The Morning Walk, oil on canvas by Thomas Gainsborough, 1785; in the (credit: Courtesy of the trustees of the National Gallery, London)

(click to enlarge)
The Morning Walk, oil on canvas by Thomas Gainsborough, 1785; in the (credit: Courtesy of the trustees of the National Gallery, London)

(baptized May 14, 1727, Sudbury, Eng.died Aug. 2, 1788, London) British painter. At 13 he left his native Suffolk to study in London. By 1750, back in Suffolk, he had established a reputation in portraiture and landscape painting. He painted landscapes for pleasure; portraiture was his profession. In 1759 he moved to the fashionable spa of Bath, where his works would be seen by a wider and wealthier public. In 1768 he became a founding member of the Royal Academy of Art. He developed an elegant, formal portrait style inspired by Anthony Van Dyck, whose influence can be seen in such portraits as his famous Blue Boy (1770). In 1774 he moved to London and became a favourite of the royal family, preferred above the official court painter, Joshua Reynolds. His love of landscape came from studying 17th-century Dutch artists and later Peter Paul Rubens, whose influence is evident in The Watering Place (1777). His output was prodigious; he produced many landscape drawings in various media, and in his later years he also created images of seascapes, pastoral subjects, and children.

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Gainsborough painted few full-length portraits in Suffolk. Mr. William Woollaston, although an ambitious composition, is intimate and informal. The Painter’s Daughters Chasing a Butterfly, composed in the last years at Ipswich, is, in its easy naturalism and sympathetic understanding, one of the best English portraits of children.

As well as straight portraits, he painted in Suffolk a number of delightful spontaneous groups of small figures in landscapes closely related to conversation pieces. Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, which has been described as the most English of English pictures, is set in a typical Suffolk landscape. Lady and Gentleman in Landscape is more Frenchified, with its vivacious Rococo rhythms, but Heneage Lloyd and His Sister is more stylized, the charming little figures being posed against a conventional background of steps and decorative urns.

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