Portrait of a Girl (fragment of 'Portrait of a Boy and Girl')

The companion fragment to the Portrait of a Boy, this 1744 study of a girl's face at Gainsborough's House completes the pair that once composed Gainsborough's earliest documented double portrait. The act of division that separated these two children's faces from their original shared composition reflects the practical history of family portraits across generations: as families dispersed through marriage and inheritance, portraits were sometimes cut to allow distribution of individual likenesses, or because the association between particular individuals no longer needed to be maintained in a single image. At 44.8 by 33.5 centimeters, this fragment is substantially smaller than the boy's portrait — possibly because the original division was unequal, or because subsequent trimming reduced it further. What survives is the girl's face with the specific freshness of childhood that Gainsborough observed with the same direct attention he brought to adult sitters: not idealized into the pink-and-white prettiness of conventional child portraiture, but rendered with the honest observation of a seventeen-year-old painter for whom every face was an exercise in truthful seeing. Together these two fragments document Gainsborough's formation more intimately than any of his more polished early commissions.

Like its companion, this fragment reveals Gainsborough's precocious ability to capture character and expression. The girl's features are painted with a lightness of touch unusual for such a young artist, the eyes particularly well-observed and full of the vitality that characterizes Gainsborough's best portraits.