Die Töchter des Malers beim Verfolgen eines Schmetterlings

Gainsborough painted this around 1756, while he was still working out of Ipswich, years before the fashionable sitters at Bath made his name. The two girls are his own daughters, Mary and Margaret, called Molly and Peggy at home, the only two of his children to survive infancy. They run hand in hand after a cabbage white butterfly that has settled on a tall thistle. Molly has gathered up her muslin apron like a net, while Margaret simply reaches out a bare hand toward it. He left the painting unfinished, which is why the landscape around them stays loose and thin. Both daughters grew into unsettled adulthoods. Molly's brief marriage failed, Margaret never married, and the two spent their later years living together.