Gainsborough in London

The Suffolk painter is best known for his rural scenes – but his last years in the capital were the pinnacle of his career

- Susan Sloman

The writer Captain Philip Thicknesse said of his friend Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) that, ‘though he is a shy man, he knows he is one of the first geniuses in Europe’.

This remark was made in 1773. It is striking because, at that time, the artist had never travelled abroad and did not even live in the English capital.

Between 1759 and 1774, he worked in Bath, perfecting a distinctive style of painting and establishing a network of influential friends and clients.

His move to London in 1774 earned him the right to be called one of the great figures of the 18th century. Today, our ideas about the English countryside are informed by his landscapes. Our concept of what men and women of the Georgian period looked like is, to a significant degree, founded on Gainsborough’s portraits.

Having shared his house in Bath with his milliner sister, Mary Gibbon, he was unusually sensitive to changing tastes in fashion and understood better than most artists the properties of fabrics and the way garments were cut and constructed.