The Artist’s Daughter Mary

This is Gainsborough painting his own daughter, not a client. Mary was the elder of his two girls, and he made this portrait around 1777 alongside a matching one of her younger sister Margaret. Neither was ever really finished, and the family kept both rather than sell them. Today the two sisters hang in the same room at the National Gallery in London, Mary's portrait on loan from Tate. Gainsborough had hoped the two would take up landscape painting, his own first love, but neither had any interest in it. Mary's own life turned difficult. Her brief marriage collapsed, and the sisters spent almost all of their years living side by side, much as they do here on the wall.