Studio: international art (86.1923)

THE GAINSBOROUGH FAMILY PORTRAITS

exceedingly well done and shows that
Gainsborough, at twenty-five, was already
a capable figure painter. As a landscape
painter he had made a reputation before
coming to Ipswich, and a reputation that
was more than local. In 1750, Vertue
records in one of his notebooks, when
speaking of the circular landscapes that are
still at the Foundling Hospital, that Gains-
borough's was regarded as “ the best and
most masterly ” of them all. And one of the
circular landscapes—“ rounds ” as Vertue
calls them, is by Richard Wilson! The
landscape background of the group shows
in some respects—in colour and breadth
of treatment — an advance upon the
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PORTRAIT OF MISS SUSAN GARDINER
BY THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH, R.A.

(By courtesy of Messrs. M. Knoedler & Co.)

National Gallery picture of a few years
earlier, the large Cornard Wood, which
Gainsborough himself, in his remarkable
letter to Henry Bate Dudley, criticised as
being “ a little in the schoolboy style.” a
Always happy in his rendering of
draperies, Gainsborough in this group
sketches with delightful ease and directness
the details of his wife's dress with its
voluminous skirts. And the draperies have
qualities of colour that were not fully
revealed until the picture was cleaned soon
after it was acquired by Messrs. Knoedler.
But where had Gainsborough learned at
twenty-five to paint draperies so well or
dogs so naturally as the one that figures in