Thomas Gainsborough was an English painter, born in 1727 in Sudbury, a cloth town in Suffolk, northeast of London, who died in London in 1788. He painted The Blue Boy, a life-size young gentleman in blue satin that sold in 1921 for a record price.
His quick, feathery brushwork set him apart from the other portrait painters of his day, and he became the great rival of Joshua Reynolds, the leading portraitist in London. He painted portraits to earn his living and landscapes for his own pleasure.
His career was less smooth than that satin suggests. He fell out with the Royal Academy, the society of artists that held London's great yearly exhibition, and in 1784 he pulled every one of his pictures from its show. His final years went into a peep show lit by candles.
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Gainsborough grew up in Sudbury as the fifth son of a cloth merchant. At thirteen he was sent to London as apprentice to a silversmith, and there he learned to draw with Hubert Gravelot, a French engraver and book illustrator who was working in the city.
The training paid off quickly. By 1745 he had a studio of his own in London, and in 1746 he married Margaret Burr, the illegitimate daughter of the Duke of Beaufort, who had settled an annuity of 200 pounds a year on her.
Back in Suffolk, and a lap left blank
After his father's death in 1748, Gainsborough and his wife went back to Suffolk. Around 1750 he painted a young landowner and his new bride there, posed in front of their own fields, and he left a patch of her lap bare.
What You'll Discover
What he left blank on a lap.
Who the boy in blue was.
What the X-ray found beside him.
Why he pulled every picture.
The box lit by one candle.
The name he said at the end.