Mme Elizabeth Moody avec ses fils Samuel et Thomas

Gainsborough began this around 1779 as a portrait of one person, young Mrs Elizabeth Moody, standing alone in a wooded landscape and playing with a string of pearls. Then in 1782 she died. A few years later her widower brought the picture back to the painter and asked him to add the two little boys she had left behind, Samuel and Thomas, who had been infants when she died. Gainsborough painted out the pearls, shifted her arms, and set the sons against her skirts, so that a portrait of a living woman quietly became a memorial. X-rays still show the ghost of her first pose underneath. The boy Thomas later gave the painting to Dulwich, the London gallery where it hangs, apparently to keep it from his stepmother.