Carl Friedrich Abel

Gainsborough loved music almost as much as painting. He played several instruments, by his own cheerful account not very well, and counted London's finest musicians among his closest friends. One was Carl Friedrich Abel, a German master of the viola da gamba who, with Johann Christian Bach, ran the subscription concerts that shaped fashionable London's musical life for 20 years. Gainsborough painted him in 1777 not performing but composing, pen in hand, pausing over a sheet of music, his six-stringed gamba propped beside him and a small dog asleep against his leg. The brushwork is the free, feathery kind of his later years. The gamba itself was by then an old man's instrument, slipping out of fashion just as Abel, its last great virtuoso, sat for his friend.