The Pitminster Boy

Nobody recorded this boy's name. He lived in Gainsborough's household around 1768 and worked as a studio help, and one of his jobs was to carry the painter's materials when Gainsborough went out sketching in the countryside. The picture is named after his home village, Pitminster, in Somerset. No one paid for it. Gainsborough painted it quickly for himself, in loose strokes, and left parts of it unfinished, because what interested him was the expression on the boy's face. It belongs to an old Dutch habit, the tronie, a head painted to study a character or a mood rather than to record a client. The painting is privately owned and hangs in the National Gallery on loan, arranged through Gainsborough's House, the museum in the painter's birthplace at Sudbury.