Samuel Kilderbee (1725–1813)

Samuel Kilderbee, painted around 1750 and now at the Colchester and Ipswich Museums, is among the most personally significant portraits in Gainsborough's entire output. Kilderbee was the town clerk of Ipswich, a lawyer of substance and a man of considerable intelligence and cultural sympathy, and his friendship with Gainsborough was one of the most important relationships of the painter's personal life. Gainsborough's letters — among the most entertaining correspondence in the history of British art, full of wit, self-deprecation, and direct expression of aesthetic opinion — show the warmth and ease of a genuine friendship uncomplicated by professional obligation. The portrait, painted when Kilderbee was approximately twenty-five and Gainsborough slightly younger, captures the beginning of a friendship that would last until Gainsborough's death. The direct gaze, the informal bearing, and the absence of the formal social performance that characterized commissioned portraiture together create one of the most psychologically immediate portraits in his early output. Kilderbee kept the portrait for the rest of his life — he died in 1813, aged eighty-eight — as a document of the friendship that had shaped both men's lives.

The portrait of a friend carries a warmth and informality that distinguishes it from Gainsborough's routine commissions. The face is painted with the sympathetic directness of a painter who knows his sitter well, the overall treatment relaxed and natural — a conversation between friends rather than a formal sitting.