Gainsborough was born in Sudbury, Suffolk, one of nine children. He went to London in AD 1740, where he worked under the French illustrator and engraver Gravelot. He also copied and restored 17th-century Dutch landscape paintings for London dealers. The influence of Dutch painting can be seen in his own earliest landscapes of Suffolk.

Gainsborough worked in Sudbury and then Ipswich between 1748 and 1759. In about 1749 he painted Mr and Mrs Andrews, in which the young couple and the rural landscape are given equal weight. Local patronage was not enough, however, and in 1759 he moved to fashionable Bath. He quickly became sought-after and painted elegant full-length, life-size portraits of wealthy sitters set against romantic landscapes.

In 1774, Gainsborough moved to London, having been elected to the Royal Academy. He began a long rivalry with its President, Sir Joshua Reynolds. The Royal family preferred Gainsborough and he painted both George III and Queen Charlotte. He continued to paint expensive pictures of the famous, he also produced what Reynolds called his ‘fancy pictures’. These combined landscapes and pastoral scenes and looked forward to the poetry of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads and the landscapes of another Suffolk painter, John Constable.