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A fuller, richer picture of an artist at the height of his powers Thomas Gainsborough’s (1727–88) London years, from 1774 to 1788, were the pinnacle and conclusion of his career. They coincided with the establishment of the Royal Academy, of which Gainsborough was a founding member, and the city’s ascendance as a center for the arts. This is a meticulously researched and readable account of how Gainsborough designed his home and studio and maintained a growing schedule of influential patrons, making a place for himself in the art world of late-18th-century London. New material about Gainsborough’s technique is based on examinations of his pictures and firsthand accounts by studio visitors. His fractious relationship with the Royal Academy and its exhibition culture is reexamined through the works he sent to its annual shows. The full range of Gainsborough’s art, from fashionable portraits to landscapes and fancy pictures, is addressed in this major contribution, not just to the study of a great artist, but to 18th-century studies in general.Distributed for Modern Art Press

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Based on new research, this profusely illustrated book draws together for the first time a group of works from public and private collections to examine the relationship that Thomas Gainsborough had with the theatrical world and the most celebrated stage artists of his day. Thomas Gainsborough (1727–88) was linked with the stage through personal friendships with James Quin, David Garrick and Sarah Siddons, the most renowned actors of the eighteenth century. He painted notable portraits of these and twenty others, including dramatists, dancers and composers. Not long after Gainsborough moved from Bath to London in 1774, the management of the Drury Lane theatre passed to the artist's friends Richard Brinsley and Thomas Linley. At this time, London's theatres were undergoing regular refurbishment to take account of technical innovations in lighting and stage machinery. At the King's Theatre in Haymarket in 1778, the 'elegant improvements' included frontispiece figures emblematic of Music and Dancing, and were painted in monochrome by Gainsborough. This publication firmly establishes the artist’s place within the theatrical worlds of Bath and London and shows why the art of ballet, and in particular Gainsborough’s sitters Gaetan Vestris, Auguste Vestris and Giovanna Baccelli, rose to prominence in 1780. It examines parallels between Gainsborough’s much admired painterly naturalism and the theatrical naturalism of David Garrick and Mrs Siddons, with whom he had personal friendships.

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Despite this famous protestation in a letter to his friend William Jackson, Gainsborough was clearly prepared to make an exception when it came to making portraits of his own family and himself. This book, and the major exhibition it accompanies, features a dozen portraits of his daughters Mary and Margaret, the same number of himself and his wife Margaret (though, perhaps tellingly, only one of the couple together), as well as works depicting four of his five siblings, his handsome nephew Gainsborough Dupont (who became his studio assistant) , an aunt and uncle, several in - laws and – last, but not least – his beloved dogs, Tristram and Fox. Spanning more than four decades, Gainsborough’s family portraits chart the period from the mid - 1740s, when he plied his trade in his native Suffolk , through his time in Bath ( 1758 – 74 ), when he established hi mself with a rich and fashionable clientele , to his most successful latter years at his luxuriously appointed studio in London’s We st End. Alongside this story of a provincial 18th - century artist’s rise to fame and fortune runs a more private narrative, ab out the role of portraiture in the promotion of family values, at a time when these were assuming a recogni s ably modern form. In the first of three introductory essays, David H. Solkin writes on Gainsborough himself, placing his family portraits in the context of earlier practice – including that of the Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens and British portraitists from Mary Beale to Joseph Highmore . Ann Bermingham explores Gainsborough’s portraits of his daughters, with particular reference to two finished double portraits painted seven years apart and the tragic story arising from them. Susan Sloman discusses Margaret’s role as her husband’s business manager, its effect on the family dynamic and hence the visual representation of its members.

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