‘Portrait of an Elegant Georgian Lady Wearing a Yellow Dress’
Oil on canvas: 46 x 34 inches. Framed size: 54 x 44 inches. Circa 1780.
PRICE GUIDE £6,000-£10,000

Biography

This highly accomplished portrait is a work of the period of the English portrait and landscape painter Thomas Gainsborough and strongly showing his influence.

Gainsborough was born in Sudbury, Suffolk, on May 14, 1727 as the son of a draper. At the age of 13 he went to London to train as a silver engraver. During these years, Thomas Gainsborough attended the London St. Martin's Lane Academy, where he met William Hogarth and other artists. In 1749.He moved to the fashionable city of Bath in 1759. Thomas Gainsborough was a founding member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, which was lead by Joshua Reynolds. At the Academy's first public exhibition in 1768, Thomas Gainsborough showed a portrait of Isabella Lady Molyneux.

At an early stage in his career, Thomas Gainsborough turned against a strict academic approach and tried to take the then propagated idealization of motifs to a more subtle pictorial representation. Gainsborough did not paint his portraits in a studio, but against a backdrop of a landscape, trying to depict the sensitive and the casual nature of an otherwise artificial and stiff process. His portrait of William Hallett and his wife Elizabeth during their "Morning Walk" (1785, London, National Gallery) provides a typical example of his style. In 1774 Thomas Gainsborough moved to London, where he died on August 2, 1788.

This highly decorative Georgian painting was originally restored & conserved in the early 19th century, and framed as an oval. TFA has recently cleaned & restored the canvas to reveal its true colours and reframed in ornate gilt Louis style frame.