Gainsborough Dupont (1754–1797)

Gainsborough Dupont — the painter's nephew and only formal pupil — was around eighteen or nineteen when this intimate portrait was painted at Waddesdon Manor around 1773. Dupont had entered his uncle's studio in Bath around 1772 and would spend the rest of Gainsborough's life as his primary assistant, stretching canvases, preparing grounds, and eventually beginning to paint independently in a manner so close to his master's that attribution problems still complicate the cataloguing of late Gainsborough portraits. The portrait's informality — the sitter's youth, the warm personal quality of the observation — reveals the private face of a working studio relationship that the formal commissioned portrait tradition rarely allowed. Gainsborough's own children, Mary and Margaret, had been the subjects of several family portraits, and Dupont joins this small group of personally significant sitters for whom Gainsborough relaxed the professional conventions of formal portraiture. After Gainsborough's death in 1788, Dupont attempted to maintain the practice but struggled to find the same aristocratic patronage, dying in 1797 before fully establishing an independent reputation. This portrait preserves him at the beginning of what proved to be a truncated artistic life.

The portrait of a fellow painter brings out Gainsborough's most natural and affectionate handling, with the young man's features painted with warm familiarity. The relaxed, informal treatment suggests the closeness of the relationship between uncle and nephew, free from the social posturing that characterizes many of Gainsborough's society commissions.