The Marsham Children

In July 1787 Charles Marsham, an English landowner soon to be made Earl of Romney, asked Gainsborough for a life-size portrait of his four children. It came near the end of the painter's life. He would die the following summer. By then his brushwork had gone loose and feathery, and the whole late-summer landscape here is built from little more than flicks of colour. The four children are out gathering hazelnuts, one of them reaching up into the branches. It all looks caught on the spot, and it was nothing of the kind. Gainsborough planned the scene carefully, then painted the children's faces afterward from separate sittings and set them into the picture.