This exhibition therefore seeks to shed new light on the career of the young Gainsborough by focusing on a number of newly identified landscapes. These works reveal a great deal not only about the evolving technique of the child genius, but also about where he...
Thomas Gainsborough is known the world over as one of the greatest British artists that ever lived. What is less known, however, are the circumstances of his beginnings as an artist, how he almost miraculously emerged from a small Suffolk market town at the age of about twelve, apparently a fully formed artist able to paint and draw like a professional. This child prodigy was in many senses a Mozart of art. But unlike Mozart, whose brilliant life ended at the age of thirty-six, Gainsborough went on to enjoy a long and constantly successful career. He became such a feature of eighteenth century artistic life, and his distinctively painted landscapes and portraits the required highlights of any decent collection, that his very differently painted early works were eclipsed, as were his humble origins. Despite his fame, the son of Gainsborough's first biographer, George Fulcher, quite accurately wrote that until his father's book was published in 1829 'Gainsborough's history was a...
Thomas Gainsborough is known the world over as one of the greatest British artists that ever lived. What is less known, however, are the circumstances of his beginnings as an artist, how he almost miraculously emerged from a small Suffolk market town at the age of about twelve, apparently a fully formed artist able to paint and draw like a professional. This child prodigy was in many senses a Mozart of art. But unlike Mozart, whose brilliant life ended at the age of thirty-six, Gainsborough went on to enjoy a long and constantly successful career. He became such a feature of eighteenth century artistic life, and his distinctively painted landscapes and portraits the required highlights of any decent collection, that his very differently painted early works were eclipsed, as were his humble origins. Despite his fame, the son of Gainsborough's first biographer, George Fulcher, quite accurately wrote that until his father's book was published in 1829 'Gainsborough's history was a blank to all the world in general'.
