Sensitive to the drama of light

If a portrait ‘happened to be on the easel’, wrote Henry Angelo of Thomas Gainsborough, ‘he was in the humour for a growl at the dispensation of all sublunary things. If, on the other hand, he was engaged in a landscape composition, then he was all gaiety – his imagination was in the skies.’ What Angelo doubtless meant was that the painter’s creativity rose like a balloon into the air. But, looking at Gainsborough’s work assembled at Tate Britain in a huge retrospective (until 19 January), one might be excused for taking his words literally.

Take a step back from the early paintings in the first room, and you become overwhelmingly aware of their skies. At this stage, the young painter was clearly under the influence of 17th-century Dutch masters, Ruisdael especially, but his cloudscapes are personal and touching. Tender, dove-grey as much as blue, with a Mozartian mixture of sunshine and shadow, in some cases darkening to mulberry with approaching rain, they give drama and emotional tone to the pictures.