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. Hung in a backroom were his views of the countryside around Bath, inhabited by the figures of colliers and gipsies encountered on excursions during the summer, when the resort was quiet and he could discuss art theory, new lenses and pigments with the gentleman collectors, doctors and apothecaries permanently resident in the city.

Every detail of the above is new research published by Dr Susan Sloman in her Gainsborough in Bath, a book which promises to be the definitive study of the painter’s 16 years between leaving Sudbury in 1758 and departing from London in 1774. Arriving, he was ‘an accomplished minor master of great charm’- in the words of Ellis Waterhouse – and charging five guineas for a head.