Related Paintings of Thomas Gainsborough. It is clear, however, that his landscapes and rural pieces, and some of his portraits, were as significant as Reynolds acknowledged them to be in 1788. His portraits, landscapes and subject pictures are only now coming to be studied in all their complexity having previously been viewed as being isolated from the social, philosophical and ideological currents of their time, they have yet to be fully related to them. It has been usual to consider his career in terms of the rivalry with Reynolds that was acknowledged by their contemporaries while Reynolds maintained an intellectual and academic ideal of art, Gainsborough grounded his imagery on contemporary life, maintaining an aesthetic outlook previously given its most powerful expression by William Hogarth. He painted with unmatched skill and bravura while giving the impression of a kind of holy innocence, he was among the most artistically learned and sophisticated painters of his generation.

At the time of his death he was expanding the range of his art, having lived through one of the more complex and creative phases in the history of British painting. He was a person of rapidly changing moods, humorous, brilliant and witty. He was, nevertheless, as his surviving letters show, verbally adept, extremely witty and highly cultured. Because his friend, the musician and painter William Jackson (1730-1803), claimed that Gainsborough detested reading, there has been a tendency to deny him any literacy. He was as various in his drawings and was among the first to take up the new printmaking techniques of aquatint and soft-ground etching. By the mid-1760s he was making formal allusions to a wide range of previous art, from Rubens and Watteau to, eventually, Claude and Titian. He founded his landscape manner largely on the study of northern European artists and developed a very beautiful and often poignant imagery of the British countryside. Less ambitious than Reynolds in his portraits, he nevertheless painted with elegance and virtuosity. Reynolds was acknowledging a general opinion that Gainsborough was one of the most significant painters of their generation. He went on to consider Gainsborough portraits, landscapes and fancy pictures within the Old Master tradition, against which, in his view, modern painting had always to match itself. He was the contemporary and rival of Joshua Reynolds, who honoured him on 10 December 1788 with a valedictory Discourse (pubd London, 1789), in which he stated: If ever this nation should produce genius sufficient to acquire to us the honourable distinction of an English School, the name of Gainsborough will be transmitted to posterity, in the history of Art, among the very first of that rising name. English painter, draughtsman and printmaker.

Lady in blue thomas gainsborough