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Paperback – 145 x 115 mm – 144 pages

Fifty-one colour illustrations

ISBN 9781843681663

“Nature sat to Mr. Gainsborough in all her attractive attitudes of beauty, and his pencil traced with peculiar and matchless felicity... I never yet saw any other portrait painter who painted the mind, nay the very soul of the living man.”

One of the best-loved painters in English history, Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) was also one of the most personally engaging. Bon vivant, wit, amateur, and enthusiastic musician, he charmed sitters and friends alike. His ebullient, if not always reliable, personality comes to life in these memoirs, written by two very different friends.

Philip Thicknesse, one of the most eccentric and cantankerous figures of the eighteenth century, was a close companion and shrewd observer of the painter whom he claimed to have discovered, and with whom he had repeated spats.

William Jackson, a distinguished musician and connoisseur, also claimed to have been the first to see Gainsborough’s talent, but fell out with the painter over his reckless lifestyle, before writing an affectionate yet clear-eyed memoir.

Both these essays illuminate not just the man but also his art, and the impact of his increasingly daring and poetic style. They are published here in full for the first time since the eighteenth century, together with the considered and thoughtful appraisal by Gainsborough’s rival, Sir Joshua Reynolds. Devoting the whole of his Fourteenth Discourse to Gainsborough, Reynolds gave a painter’s analysis of his work that remains one of the most penetrating accounts of one English artist by another ever written.

An introduction by a leading independent scholar of Gainsborough and the English eighteenth century, Anthony Mould, brings out the value of these fascinating texts and their relation to Gainsborough’s painting.