Portrait of the Artist with his Wife and Daughter

Portrait of the Artist with his Wife and Daughter, painted around 1748 and held at the National Gallery, is one of Gainsborough’s earliest surviving self-portraits, showing the twenty-one-year-old painter with his new wife Margaret Burr and their baby daughter Mary. The informal family group, set in a landscape, demonstrates Gainsborough’s early integration of portraiture and landscape that would become his signature approach. Margaret Burr brought a small annuity to the marriage that provided financial security while Gainsborough established his practice. This intimate family portrait provides a rare personal glimpse of the young artist at the very beginning of his career.

The early self-portrait shows Gainsborough's instinctive feeling for the integration of figures with landscape, a quality that distinguishes all his finest work. The touch is already distinctive — lighter and more fluid than the prevailing English manner — though still showing the influence of Dutch and French Rococo painting.