This portrait of Thomas Gainsborough’s youngest daughter, Margaret (1751–1820), playing a theorbo (a kind of lute) unites two particularly personal aspects of the artist’s life and career: his deep affection for his family and friends, and their shared passion for music.
Gainsborough was, alongside his rival Joshua Reynolds, the leading portrait painter in England in the second half of the eighteenth century. Yet, his private correspondence reveals his preference for painting landscape and rustic scenes, and playing music, over the demands of painting portraits for difficult sitters: in a letter of the 1760s he famously wrote: ‘I’m sick of Portraits and wish very much to take my Viol da Gamba and walk off to some sweet Village where I can paint Landskips [landscapes]’.
This irritation with society portraiture did not, however, extend to portraits of those close to him, in particular likenesses of his wife, Margaret, and his daughters. His eldest daughter Mary, who is shown in a group portrait with her parents in the National Gallery Collection, died in infancy in 1748. His second daughter, also named Mary, and youngest, Margaret, shown here, are captured by his paintbrush in charming and spontaneous immediacy as children chasing a butterfly and holding a cat in two unfinished pictures in the collection (NG1811 and NG3812). The girls were brought up in Suffolk until the family moved to Bath in 1759, and then to London, where their father’s career flourished. As well as fatherly affection shining through in his portraits, surviving letters confirm that Gainsborough doted on his children, writing frequently when they were apart.
Gainsborough ensured his daughters were well-educated, and they were taught painting and drawing, as well as music. The family became keen amateur musicians, although Gainsborough was adamant that his daughters were not to become public performers. This portrait was once thought to be of Mary, who played the harpsichord, but is now identified as Margaret, the more musical member of the family. Margaret never married but spent much of her adult life caring for Mary who suffered from mental illness. Margaret is shown here in her mid-twenties, fashionably dressed with her hair piled high and powdered. Gainsborough made two other portraits of Margaret as an adult, both in the formal manner of society portraits, but this is a much more intimate work which, in its vigorous bravura manner, demonstrates a forward-looking, almost modern, aspect to Gainsborough’s late portraiture. In this portrait, Margaret plucks the strings of her instrument while looking out to her right, perhaps making music in harmony with another member of her family.
As with the two other pictures of Mary and Margaret in the collection, this painting is clearly unfinished, which may indicate that Gainsborough painted these portraits for his own satisfaction, unhindered by the pressure to complete for a patron or sitter. The unfinished state gives an insight into the artist’s working process; sketching the outlines in thick bold black paint on a primed canvas of a reddish-brown colour, a favoured technique of the artist which was inspired by the practice of Van Dyck or Rubens.
