How the master of landscape was transformed

In 1760s Bath, the promenade from the Pump Room to the tree-lined Walks of Orange Grove passed a row of luxury shops and a sign reading ‘Mr Gainsborough, Painter’. The artist’s showroom shared the ground floor of a handsome town house with his sister’s millinery shop, and the smell of the perfumes on sale mingled with the oil paint drying on masterpieces such as ‘Countess Howe’ and ‘The Byam Family’.

In London, prints publicised an artist; in the crowded winter resort a showroom invited visitors with time and money on their hands to judge the likeness of a celebrity who might have been glimpsed in the Pump Room a few minutes before. If tempted, the client ascended to the artist’s studio on the floor above. Gainsborough shared the grand house in Abbey Street, originally built for the Duke of Kingston, with his sister and her paying lodgers; she was one of ten members of the family to follow him from their native Suffolk to the booming spa in Somerset.