Portrait of the Painter's Two Daughters

In 1758 Gainsborough was still a provincial portrait painter in Ipswich, years before the fashionable sitters of Bath and London made his name. The strangers whose faces paid his bills are mostly forgotten now. This picture he made for no client at all. It shows his own daughters, Mary and Margaret, seated close together with sketchbooks in their laps in front of a classical statue. He sent both girls to a drawing school in Chelsea, and here he sets them down as young artists, pencils ready before an antique figure, as if their futures lay in the studio. Gainsborough returned to his daughters again and again in private portraits he kept rather than sold. This one stayed in the family for generations before it reached the Victoria and Albert Museum, where it hangs today.