Gypsy Encampment, Sunset

By 1779 Gainsborough was in London, prosperous and busy painting the faces of high society, which is what actually paid him. Landscapes like this one he made largely for himself, and here he went back to something he had loved as a young man in Suffolk in the 1750s, a band of roadside travellers gathered round a cooking fire as the light fails. He works the whole picture in warm browns and reds, the campfire and the sunset almost the same glow, a distant church tower just catching the last light. British painters usually kept such figures at the edges of a scene. Gainsborough set them at its centre, settling down to their evening meal.