Thomas Gainsborough: Background information when reading The Painter's Daughters

Thomas Gainsborough

This article relates to The Painter's Daughters

Emily Howes' enthralling debut novel, The Painter's Daughters, features a fictionalized version of the lives of Molly and Peggy Gainsborough. Their father, Thomas Gainsborough, was one of the most influential British painters of the 18th century.

Gainsborough, born in 1727, was the youngest of John and Mary Gainsborough's nine children. His father was a wool manufacturer in Sudbury, Suffolk. He lived there until the age of 13, when he was sent to London to study under Hubert-François Gravelot, a French painter and illustrator. From him, Gainsborough gained exposure to the Rococo style, which heavily influenced his work. In 1746, he married Margaret Burr, and they went on to have the two daughters who are the main characters of the novel.

In 1752, the same year younger daughter Peggy was born, the family moved to Ipswich, where Gainsborough worked as a portrait painter. Despite making a living from these portraits, he preferred landscapes, which at the time had not yet gained prominence in England. Seven years later, Gainsborough moved to Bath in the hopes of amassing a larger clientele. This was a success, as he began to attract patrons of a higher social and economic status. In Bath he refined his portraiture, sometimes also combining portraits with his favored landscapes in a single painting, an innovation that would become popular in British art in the coming years. When the Royal Academy was established in 1768, Gainsborough was a founding member. In 1774 he moved to London, where he continued to find great success, even being commissioned to paint King George III and Queen Charlotte. He died in 1788, at the age of 61.

Gainsborough was one of the first major English painters to devote significant time to landscapes and so was key to the increase in respect given to this genre of art and the establishment of a landscape tradition in England. Over the course of his career, he developed a romantic style, especially with his idealized paintings of rural life, which would go on to be highly influential to later British artists. Today, his paintings are displayed in major institutions around the world, including the British Museum in London, the Louvre in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia, in addition to many others.

Landscape in Suffolk (1748) by Thomas Gainsborough, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Filed under Music and the Arts

This article relates to The Painter's Daughters. It first ran in the March 20, 2024 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.