The Painter's Daughters with a Cat

The Painter's Daughters with a Cat from around 1750 in the National Gallery is one of the earliest of the remarkable series of family portraits Gainsborough made of Mary and Margaret throughout their childhood — informal, tender works in which fatherly observation overrides the conventions of commissioned portraiture. The unfinished quality of the work — the background barely sketched, the figures described with fresh, rapid confidence — suggests it was made quickly for personal reasons rather than for exhibition. The cat, which the children appear to be attempting to hold still, introduces an element of domestic comedy and an implicit narrative of the difficulty of posing young children, making the painting one of the most spontaneously observed child images in eighteenth-century art. The National Gallery holds this work alongside the slightly later Painter's Two Daughters as complementary family documents.

Executed in oils with an informal directness absent from his commissioned portraits, the painting shows Gainsborough's natural facility for capturing unguarded expressions. The warm palette and soft handling of the children's features reveal an emotional tenderness that elevates this beyond mere portraiture.