The story
Two halves of one canvas are reunited in Sudbury. Around 1744, while he was still a teenager training in London, Thomas Gainsborough painted a boy and a girl side by side. At some point, nobody knows when or why, the picture was cut in two, and the halves came to this museum separately.
The museum is the house where Gainsborough was born in 1727, the youngest of nine children of John Gainsborough, a Sudbury cloth merchant. It stayed a private home into the 1920s and later served as a guest house and an antique shop, until a society formed in 1958 to save it opened it as a museum in 1961.
The collection follows him from those Suffolk beginnings. The Wooded Landscape with a Herdsman Seated, painted in 1748 after he came home from London, is thought to show the countryside near Sudbury, and the museum bought it in 1990. In November 2022 the house reopened after a £10 million project that added a three-storey building in local brick and flint by the architects ZMMA, with four new galleries and room for loans from collections such as Tate and the National Portrait Gallery. Inside the new wing, a camera obscura looks out over the Suffolk landscape that Gainsborough painted as a young man.
