Gainsborough’s interest in music can be dated from at least the 1750s. During that decade he was a member of the Ipswich Music Society, being friendly with the composer and organist Joseph Gibbs, whose portrait he painted. In a letter to the actor David Garrick, he recalled an amusing event that took place at an Ipswich concert while he was acting as steward. Having asked the amateur singer if he could sing a new song at sight, he was answered in the affirmative. However, when it came to the concert silence followed the orchestral introduction. Gainsborough was on his feet, “Damn you! Why don’t you sing? Did you not tell me you could sing at sight?” “Yes, please your honour, I did say I could sing at sight, but not first sight.” Coincidentally, the music historian Charles Burney related a near-identical story about Handel and one of his singers.

The leader of that concert was none other than Felice Giardini, whose violin playing had created a sensation following his arrival in England in 1750. Later, in Bath, Giardini and Gainsborough become intimate friends, the painter often speaking of the Italian violinist’s virtuosity in glowing terms. He recalled in a letter how Giardini had bought a small violin nobody wanted because of its poor tone. “In his Hands”, said Gainsborough, “it produced the finest Music in the World”. The painter found an “ease and gentility” in Giardini’s playing that he compared with the oratory of one of the most famous legal figures of the day. Such ease coupled with a certain restrained exuberance also informed Gainsborough’s own work. He had an intense dislike of extremes of colour and loud music, advising Garrick at a time when theatrical design had become garish to “spare the poor abused Colors, till the Eye rest & recovers – Keep up your Music by supplying the place of Noise, by more Sound, more Harmony & more Tune; and split that curs’d Fife & Drum”.

The subtlety of the rich russets and shimmering golds and silvers that feature in so many of Gainsborough’s paintings testify to his belief that both music and painting demanded a “modest truth”, a simplicity that nevertheless demanded sensitive enhancement. There must also be in music a “Variety of lively touches and surprizing Effects to make the Heart dance, or else they be better in a Church – so in Portrait Painting there must be a Lustre and finishing to bring it up to individual Life.” This love of moderation seasoned with understated virtuosity extended to Gainsborough’s distaste for the unnatural in portrait painting, the adoption of outlandish dress or themes. He reserved scorn for what he called “the ridiculous use of fancied Dress in Portraits”, instead aiming at a naturalness that led his friend and first biographer Philip Thicknesse to the perceptive verdict that “It was possible to judge a Gainsborough portrait as if it were a living person.” In holding such views and putting them into practice in his own work, Gainsborough proves himself a child of his time, a man whose appreciation of the elegant ease of the unpretentious galant style of his friends Abel and Johann Christian Bach accords entirely with his own artistic philosophy.