Thomas Linley the Elder

In the 1760s and 1770s Bath was England's fashionable resort, and much of its music ran through one man, Thomas Linley, who organised the concerts and drilled his own children into star singers, a brood admirers called the Nest of Nightingales. Thomas Gainsborough had settled in Bath in 1759 and loved music nearly as much as paint, and he became close enough to the Linleys to paint the whole household. Here the father sits in a dark oval, holding a sheet marked Elegy from a set of his own part-songs printed in 1770. The family was later broken by a run of early deaths, and it was the youngest son, William, the last of them alive, who left these portraits to Dulwich, where father and children still hang in the same rooms.