Thomas Gainsborough - painter

Thomas Gainsborough (1727-88) was one of the most famous of English portrait and landscape painters, was born in Sudbury, Suffolk. Early in life he showed his artistic talents and was sent to London to study. In 1743 after an unsuccessful attempt to establish himself in Hatton Carden, London, he settled in Ipswich, where he obtained work through Philip Thicknesse, governor of Landguard Fort, afterwards his first biographer. At his suggestion Gains-borough moved to Bath in 1760, and soon became a fashionable painter. He was one of the 36 original members (1768) of the Royal Academy; but being offended by the poor position given to his "Three Princesses" in 1784, he withdrew, and never exhibited again. In 1774 he left Bath, and settled in London.
Gainsborough was the rival of Reynolds in portraiture, and of Richard Wilson in landscape. He, more than any other artist, should be called the father of modern English painting and his influence as first of the impressionists can be traced through all contemporary art—in Constable, in the middle-Victorian landscapists, in the Glasgow school, in the New Eng¬lish Art Club. The greatest colorist of the early British school, he was rapid and facile in execution, dignified and graceful in expression, absolutely true to life and nature, and essentially English in sentiment.
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