Thomas Gainsborough (1727 – 88) was the prominent English portrait and landscape painter, in the second half of the eighteenth century, who went on to become one of the founding members of the Royal Academy. He was born in Sudbury, Suffolk, the youngest son of a wool manufacturer. At the age of twenty-three he left home to study art in London. He set up his first practice in Ipswich in 1752; seven years later he moved to the newly-fashionable spa town Bath before finally settling in London in 1774 where he lived until his death in 1788. Today his paintings command the highest auction prices in art markets around the world.
