Art Gallery

Gainsborough, Thomas (1728 - 1788), was the fifth son of a well-to-do cloth manufacturer. Because of his early talent for drawing he was sent to London at the age of thirteen. There he studied etching under the Frenchman Gravelot, a pupil of Boucher. Apart from being influenced by the French Rococo, to which he was introduced by Haymen at St. Martin's Academy, Gainsborough's landscapes were particularly affected by the 17th century Dutch landscape pictures which he had copied and restored in his early years. 

Between 1747 and 1759, in Sudbury and Ipswich, he produced this type of landscape as well as working in the style of the French pastoral idyll. In 1746 he secretly married Margaret Burr, the illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Beaufort, which ensured him financial independence. While the pure landscape was not highly appreciated in England, Gainsborough succeeded in combining full-length figure portraits with landscape, mostly depicting a location on the estate of the nobility he portrayed, and thereby becoming the founder of a new version of arcadia in the dispassionate English style. In 1759 he moved to the fashionable resort of Bath, where, inundated with portrait commissions, he developed his style further by studying van Dyck, whose work could be seen in many country houses around Bath. In 1774 he removed to London where as portrait-painter he had to vie with Reynolds and his pupils. He became increasingly interested in lighting effects, ads popularized by experiments carried out by the theatrical decorator Loutherbourgh. Gainsborough succeeded in becoming the favored portraitist of the royal family.

In 1782 he painted in Windsor a series of oval portraits of the royal couple and their thirteen children. After some dispute he retired from the Royal Academy, of which he had been a founder member in 1768, and in the 1780s he began to arrange summer exhibitions at his private house. His final creative years are marked by a sensitive, poetic style and ethereal coloration. His free compositions, or fancy pictures as he called them, date from this time. In these Gainsborough surpassed his exemplar Murillo, sensitively exploring the theme of his childlike and rustic genre in an old-masterly browntoned tenebrism. Gainsborough was a pioneer in landscape painting. Apart from his extremely personal style of portraiture and a short-lived fashion of imitating his "fancy pictures", he had an important influence on 19th century landscape painting.