Portrait of the weekCulture This article is more than 21 years oldThe Painter's Daughters Chasing a Butterfly, Thomas Gainsborough (c1756)
This article is more than 21 years oldArtist: Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), the most outrageously enjoyable British artist. Gainsborough, born in the Suffolk market town of Sudbury, built up his portrait business gradually, establishing a spectacularly successful studio in the spa town of Bath, finally hitting the capital as an artist of unparalleled style and sophistication. For all his control he was man of feeling, which shows in every brushstroke of his gorgeous paintings.
Subject: Mary (1750-1826) and Margaret (1752-1820) Gainsborough had difficult lives. As daughters of a fashionable painter they had access to high society - even to the court - but they were never going to be accepted by it. As they grew up, they came to be regarded as unmarriageable. When Mary did marry, it was to a temperamental oboeist. It didn't last. Mary and Margaret later lived together; Mary descended into mental illness.
Distinguishing features: This painting is almost unbearably touching and lyrical. It has the light of a summer evening, the spontaneity of childhood itself. Seen from a distance down a hall at the National Gallery, Gainsborough's daughters move dramatically through space, levitated as if by a magic carpet.
This moment of childhood is an enchanted theatre. The bright light on the children's faces lifts them out of a darker background like stage lighting. They have slipped, in the eyes of their doting father, out of the garden and into fairyland. Gainsborough enfolds his daughters in a folkloric woodland, where it's getting dark, but they are illuminated by his looking.
The woods might get menacing later, though, and the delicate creature they are trying to catch might be the flimsy moment of their own infancy fluttering away as they reach out for it. The point is emphasised by the way that, holding hands in silver and gold dresses, they themselves resemble the silken wings of a butterfly.
While three-year-old Mary grabs out thoughtlessly, Margaret, five, is more considered, eager to study the butterfly, to see it. Perhaps she has learned the possibility of sublimating desire into looking rather than touching, a civilising process that shapes the sensuality of Gainsborough's own paintings. He hoped his daughters would become artists; in 1764, he wrote to his friend James Unwin that he was "upon a scheeme of learning them both to paint Landscape". Around the time of this letter, in 1763 or 1764, he painted them with sketchbooks as trainee artists, beside a statue of the classical goddess Flora - a deity for them to draw, as well as an allusion to flowers, nature and landscape.
In this picture, that is all in the future. But there is a definite Enlightenment sense of curiosity and discovery, of two children eagerly moving forward into a world of knowledge. The knowledge they pursue is that of nature. The painting is full of Gainsborough's delight in the natural world - the leaves, clouds, air itself. If you were a prisoner in an airless cell, you might ask for a postcard of a Gainsborough.
For all the smallness of its heroes, this was one of the first works in which Gainsborough developed from his early, Dutch-realist manner to the exuberant scale of his later portraits. It is also a painting of togetherness. Gainsborough made his living as a portraitist, a celebrant of the individual in a free market society, yet his art is full of hints of other affiliations; he always loved landscape most of all.
Just as Gainsborough's landscapes suggest nostalgia for the country customs and community that were being eroded by money, this painting proposes children's world as better than that of adults. Chasing butterflies is better than enclosing fields. Gainsborough wrote to a friend in his old age that he was slipping back to childhood. "I am so childish," wrote the dying artist, "that I could make a Kite, catch Gold Finches, or build little Ships."
Inspirations and influences: Children also star in 18th-century paintings by Hogarth and Joseph Wright of Derby.
Where is it? National Gallery, London WC2 (020-7747 2885).
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