Gainsborough's Family Album

Gainsborough's Family Album is the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Princeton University Art Museum  in 2019.    Spanning more than four decades, Gainsborough's family portraits chart the period from the mid-1740s, when he plied his trade in his native Suffolk, to his most successful latter years at his luxuriously appointed studio in London's West End. Alongside this story of a provincial 18th-century artist's rise to fame and fortune runs a more private narrative, about the role of portraiture in the promotion of family values, at a time when these were assuming a recognizably modern form.  In the first of three introductory essays, David H. Solkin writes on Gainsborough himself, placing his family portraits in the context of earlier practice. Ann Bermingham explores Gainsborough's portraits of  his daughters, with particular reference to two finished double  portraits painted seven years apart and the tragic story arising from  them. Susan Sloman discusses Margaret's ro