Thomas Gainsborough

In 1768 a group of English painters founded the Royal Academy of Arts, and Gainsborough became one of its founding members, alongside a rival he never quite got along with, Joshua Reynolds, the Academy's first president. Reynolds preached what he called the Grand Style, warm reds borrowed from the old Roman and Florentine masters. Gainsborough went the other way, favoring cool blues and greens, and in 1770 he brought that argument straight into the Academy's exhibition room with a full-length portrait he called simply A Portrait of a Young Gentleman, now known as The Blue Boy.

The picture wasn't a commission. Gainsborough painted it on a used canvas, over an older portrait, and dressed his sitter in 17th-century costume borrowed from Anthony van Dyck, the Flemish court painter he admired. Blue silk against a stormy brown landscape, in direct defiance of Reynolds's warm palette. The gamble worked, and the painting made Gainsborough's reputation as one of the finest painters in England.

He never much liked the work that paid his bills. Born in Sudbury, Suffolk, the son of a weaver, Gainsborough trained in London, then set up shop in the fashionable spa town of Bath, painting portraits of the wealthy who passed through. In a letter to a friend he complained that he was sick of portraits and wished he could take his viola da gamba, a stringed instrument, and go paint landscapes in some quiet village instead. He kept painting the English countryside whenever a commission allowed it, right up to his death in London in 1788.