He painted that portrait himself. It is, as it were, a self-portrait.
I really grow weary of having to explain everything to you.
What this particular painter longed to do was paint landscapes, but people kept asking him to paint their portraits. One time he painted a portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Andrews. They looked like this:
Another time he painted a portrait of Mr. and Mrs. William Hallett. They looked like this:
As I said earlier, what he really wanted to do was paint landscapes, and you may have noticed that he managed to work landscapes into some of his portraits. But people kept paying him to paint their portraits.
Here is Mrs. Thomas Hibbert:
...and here is Miss Read (later Mrs. William Vilebois):
...and here is Lady Georgiana Cavendish, the Duchess of Devonshire:
...and here is John Needham, the tenth Viscount Kilmorey:
Are you bored yet?
Portraits can be so tiresome, but there is a reason I am devoting an entire post to this artist’s work, and that reason is that I committed a huge oversight. I omitted from a recent post of mine the painting for which this particular artist is most famous, and it deserved to be included.
The painter’s name was Thomas Gainsborough. He was fond of using blues when he painted, but in one portrait he completely outdid himself.
Here is Gainsborough’s best-known work, The Blue Boy:
The identity of the blue boy is unknown. It is thought to be a portrait of Jonathan Buttall (1752 – 1805), the son of a wealthy hardware merchant, although this has never been proven.
A thousand pardons, sir, for my negligence. You deserved better from me. I hope this post in some small way makes up for my having omitted your masterpiece.
Dear reader, if you do not care for Gainsborough, there’s always Picasso's Blue Period.
