Thomas Gainsborough valuation
Portraits for a living and landscapes for love, in Suffolk, Bath and the London of Reynolds.
Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) was born in Sudbury in Suffolk and went to London at about thirteen, where he worked with the French engraver Hubert Gravelot and learned the Rococo manner of the St Martin's Lane circle.
What a work by Thomas Gainsborough is worth
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Bio
Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) was born in Sudbury in Suffolk and went to London at about thirteen, where he worked with the French engraver Hubert Gravelot and learned the Rococo manner of the St Martin's Lane circle. Back in Suffolk he painted Mr and Mrs Andrews, now in the National Gallery, and in 1759 he moved to Bath, where society portraits made his fortune. He was a founder member of the Royal Academy in 1768 and settled in London in 1774, at Schomberg House on Pall Mall, as the great rival of Joshua Reynolds and a painter favoured by the royal family. He complained of being sick of portraits and longed to paint landscapes, and his late fancy pictures of country children were among his most admired works. His birthplace, Gainsborough's House in Sudbury, is now a museum.
Portraits, landscapes and drawings all come to market, and each has its own scholarship: Hugh Belsey's catalogue of the portraits and fancy pictures, published in 2019, and John Hayes's catalogues of the landscapes and drawings. Gainsborough was much copied, and his nephew Gainsborough Dupont, who trained in his studio, painted versions of his portraits and landscapes in a closely related manner, so studio work and attribution are the main questions. The landscape drawings, in chalk, wash and his own experimental mixtures, are the most accessible part of the market and among the most imitated. A portrait's sitter, and its history in the family it was painted for, add considerably to its value.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
