The Painter's Daughters with a Cat

The cat is the hardest thing to find in this picture. Gainsborough's daughters, Mary and Margaret, fill the canvas, and the animal Margaret holds was only ever sketched in among their arms. The National Gallery dates the painting to about 1760 or 1761, probably in Bath, a year or so after the family moved there. Mary, about ten, wraps her arms round her younger sister, partly to help with a wriggling cat whose tail she seems to be pulling, and partly out of plain tenderness. The little one leans her head back against Mary's cheek. Their faces are finished. Around them the landscape is only a haze of gold, blue and grey, brushed quickly over a pinkish-brown ground, where he had first drawn the design in white chalk.