The Marsham Children

Four children of the English aristocratic class play outside in this life-size group portrait. The children’s father, Charles Marsham, 1st Earl of Romney, commissioned this picture of his family from one of the most important painters of the 18th century.

The children are enveloped in a late summer landscape that is only sketchily intimated and worked up from daubs of paint applied directly on the canvas.

With short, nervous brushstrokes, Gainsborough weaves the figures and the leaves into an extraordinary dense blanket of colour.

The children’s everyday clothing indicates that the painter (and his client) were less interested in a formal portrait than in showing the sitters in a seemingly free act of play.

As the only son and heir to the family title, the boy is clearly raised above his sisters. He stands by himself, one arm curled around a branch, on the right side of the picture.

We see him placing hazelnuts in his sister’s apron.

Arm in arm, the two girls in the centre hold up the cloth.

The youngest sister – on the far left of the picture – sits alone, embracing her favourite dog.

She is the only one who looks directly at the viewer with a serious, childlike gaze.

Gainsborough only added the faces to the picture after separate portrait sessions. His apparently spontaneous style is in fact the result of careful studio planning.