When he knew that he was dying, Thomas Gainsborough selected an unfinished painting from some years before and set it on the easel in his studio. It was a portrait of his nephew, pupil and assistant Gainsborough Dupont, begun more than a decade earlier and set aside. This little work, which he seems to have intended as a sort of artistic last testament, also hangs at the end of the exhibition Gainsborough’s Family Album. What did he mean to tell us by making a small, intimate picture of a relative the conclusion to a career of more than 40 years? This marvellous and brilliantly conceived exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery supplies plenty of clues.
Firstly, it was doubtless significant that the picture on display after his death was of someone close. As the curator David Solkin explains in his catalogue essay, Gainsborough was precipitately socially mobile — upwards. The son of a bankrupt merchant-turned-postmaster from Sudbury, he died in a grand house — still standing — on the Mall, if not universally regarded as a gentleman, condemning and despising those who dared to treat him ‘in any other light’.
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