Works by Thomas Gainsborough

Thomas Gainsborough earned his living by portraits but would rather have painted landscape, and in his later portraits the sitter merges with the trees and sky behind, all in the same quick, easy strokes.

A weaver's son from Sudbury in Suffolk, he trained in London under the engraver Hubert Gravelot. His early work was mostly landscape, and when it sold poorly he went home in 1748–49 and turned to portraits. In The Gravenor Family, from about 1754, an apothecary, his wife and their two daughters pose under a great tree beside a field of wheat, their silks bright against a stormy sky.

In Bath from 1759 he studied van Dyck's portraits and won a fashionable clientele, yet he wrote to a friend that he was sick of portraits and longed for a quiet village where he could paint landscapes. He often painted landscapes by candlelight from tabletop models of stones, mirror fragments and broccoli. Landscape with Cattle, painted in Bath around 1773, sets cows by a stream in low golden light, with a couple resting under the trees.

After moving to London in 1774 he took up two printmaking methods then new, aquatint and soft-ground etching. In Wooded Landscape with Two Country Carts and Figures, a soft-ground etching of 1779/1780, heavy trees lean over a road while a dog trots along with the carts. Portraits are the largest group below, then landscapes, with drawings and prints among them. In the 1770s and 1780s he set his sitters into the land itself: in Mrs. Richard Brinsley Sheridan she sits on a rock under wind-tossed trees, her loose hair painted as freely as the leaves.

Sources: Wikidata, Wikipedia, National Gallery of Art, Yale Center for British Art.