Portrait of a Young Woman Seated ca. 1760 Thomas Gainsborough British In 1760 Gainsborough moved to Bath, England’s leading spa city, where he made this delicate chalk drawing in preparation for a lifesize oil portrait of Ann Ford. Ford was an amateur singer and musician whose bravura private performances were taking the town by storm, and Gainsborough intended his painting to establish his national reputation. He used soft black chalk to explore the seated pose and to suggest diamond-shaped pendant earrings and a dark neck ribbon. Hands and facial features are indicated lightly, since the art
Portrait of a Young Woman Seated ca. 1760 Thomas Gainsborough British In 1760 Gainsborough moved to Bath, England’s leading spa city, where he made this delicate chalk drawing in preparation for a lifesize oil portrait of Ann Ford. Ford was an amateur singer and musician whose bravura private performances were taking the town by storm, and Gainsborough intended his painting to establish his national reputation. He used soft black chalk to explore the seated pose and to suggest diamond-shaped pendant earrings and a dark neck ribbon. Hands and facial features are indicated lightly, since the artist would work these up in oil on the canvas. More detailed are the elaborate silk gown with long lace cuffs, loosely tied satin bows on bodice and sleeves, and skirt decorated with looped ribbons and rosettes. Trained in the French manner by Hubert-Franois Gravelot at St. Martin’s Lane Academy in London, Gainsborough had mastered the expressive potential of chalk at an early age and, in this mature sheet, created a fluid graphic web that delights in the abstract possibilities of the fashionably dressed female Portrait of a Young Woman Seated. Thomas Gainsborough (British, Sudbury 1727–1788 London). ca. 1760. Black chalk with touches of red wash. Drawings
Size: 1086px × 1811px
Photo credit: © MET/BOT / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
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