Thomas Gainsborough, one of the most popular British painters, has been celebrated as a landscapist, a portrait painter, and a man of feeling whose impetuous character is revealed in his art, life and letters. This book reveals that the style, themes and ideas of Gainsborough’s paintings constitute purposeful expressions of an intellectual and visual culture whose importance in the development of eighteenth-century British art has gone unrecognized. "Amal Asfour and Paul Williamson have set out to make us look more knowledgeably at the paintings of Gainsborough... their treatment is richly informative."—George Steiner, The Observer "Asfour and Williamson display a profound knowledge of 18th-century aesthetics... a highly stimulating book."—The British Art Journal

"The book begins by charting the geography and professional tactics of a career that took Gainsbourgh from London to Suffolk, Bath and eventually back to London. Rosenthal looks at such wide-ranging topics as how artists manipulated the press, the issue of likeness in portraiture, how rivalries between painters were handled in public and private, and the pressures of the public exhibition. The second part of the book explores the manifestations of Gainsborugh's aesthetic in portraiture, landscape painting and paintings of sensibility. Rosenthal concludes with a discussion of the problem of defining a role and proper form for the fine arts at a time of rapid social change and innovation."--BOOK JACKET.

The reception of Thomas Gainsborough’s Blue Boy from its origins to its appearances in contemporary visual culture reveals how its popularity was achieved and maintained by diverse audiences and in varied venues. Performative manifestations resulted in contradictory characterizations of the painted youth as an aristocrat or a "regular fellow," as masculine or feminine, or as heterosexual or gay. In private and public spaces where viewers saw the actual painting and where living and rendered replicas circulated, Gainsborough’s painting was often the centerpiece where dominant and subordinate classes met, gender identities were enacted, and sexuality was implicitly or overtly expressed.