Autoportrait

Gainsborough painted this likeness of himself around 1758, when he was in his early thirties and still working in provincial Suffolk. Within a year or so he would pack up and move to Bath, the fashionable spa town where the wealthy came to take the waters, and there he built a thriving trade in society portraits. A self-portrait like this one probably hung in his painting room as a kind of advertisement, proof to visitors that he could catch a convincing likeness. He looks out warily, half-turned, the paint handled with the light, quick touch that was already his signature. He disliked portrait work and would have rather painted landscapes, but faces were what paid.