|
More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
|
Thomas Gainsborough
|
|
(1727–88) English painter rivalled only by *Reynolds as a portraitist in the 18C and sharing with Richard *Wilson a dominant position at the start of British landscape painting. He was born in Suffolk (at Sudbury, where the family house is now a museum), and landscape was his first love as a painter. But it was portraiture which paid the bills. He had a studio in Ipswich from 1752 and moved in 1759 to fashionable Bath. Here he increasingly modelled himself on Van *Dyck, one of his most famous paintings being his 1779 portrait of the young Jonathan Buttall in a costume of Van Dyck's period (usually known as The Blue Boy, and now in the Huntington Art Gallery in Los Angeles).
|
|
|
|
In 1774 he established himself in London. His style had now evolved to a shimmering delicacy which could suggest fabric or foliage with an insubstantial lightness of touch. Portraits of elegant women, full-length in spectacular dresses against a hint of woodland background, gave him many of his greatest successes.
|
|
|
|