Thomas Linley the elder

Thomas Linley the Elder, painted around 1760 and held at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, depicts the musician and concert promoter who was at the center of Bath's cultural life during the period when Gainsborough was establishing himself in that city. Linley ran the Bath concerts, taught singing, and was connected to virtually every significant musical figure who passed through the city; his daughter Elizabeth Linley would later marry the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan and be painted by Gainsborough in one of his most celebrated female portraits. The early date of this portrait — around 1760, shortly after Gainsborough's arrival in Bath in 1759 — suggests it was painted in the first years of a friendship between two artists whose creative lives would intersect repeatedly. The Dulwich Picture Gallery's holding of this early work alongside later Gainsborough portraits provides a rare opportunity to trace his stylistic development from the careful provincial manner of his Bath beginnings toward the atmospheric freedom of his London maturity.

Gainsborough's early portrait manner is evident in the relatively precise handling and warm coloring, before the development of his mature feathery brushwork. The sympathetic characterization shows the warm personal relationship between artist and sitter.