🖼️ This week, Gainsborough’s House reopens as the world’s most comprehensive collection of the artist’s works, and the largest public gallery in Suffolk
have made Thomas Gainsborough synonymous with the high-society glamour of 18th-century London and Bath. But the Suffolk town of Sudbury has never forgotten its most celebrated son.
Later on, he was favoured by George III and Queen Charlotte, and painted famous beauties, actors and musicians, his full-length figures and gorgeous renderings of luxury fabrics sealing his reputation as the much sought-after heir to Anthony van Dyck.
The local landscape informs the museum’s new three-storey extension, which frames a view of trees and rooftops, its clay and flint structure a deliberate reference to the surrounding geology. The woven texture of the brickwork alludes also to the town’s silk industry, a relic of which is the sprawling mulberry tree in the garden, planted in the early 1600s following a campaign by King James I to seed an English silk weaving industry.
The north-facing painting room re-creates an 18th-century portraitist’s workspace, its genteel domestic setting a contrast to the noisy, bustling workshops of artists in previous eras. Here, in addition to a chair surrounded by drapes, and an easel set up in readiness for a sitter, are oddities such as plaster casts, paint bladders, and an etching press, and even a mahogany studio cabinet, with a slate for mixing colours.
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