Thomas Linley le Jeune

The boy with the violin is Thomas Linley the younger, and Gainsborough caught him around 1772, when Linley was about 16 and freshly back from Italy. He had been in Florence studying the violin, and there he met another prodigy his own exact age, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The two became friends and played together, and people who heard Linley thought England had produced its own Mozart. It never got the chance to find out. In 1778, aged 22, he was in a pleasure boat on a lake at Grimsthorpe when a squall turned it over. Still in his boots and heavy coat, he tried to swim for shore and drowned. Gainsborough, a close friend of the whole musical Linley family, painted several of them, and this portrait hangs at Dulwich among the others.