Mr and Mrs Andrews

Mr and Mrs Andrews unites the two arts Gainsborough would spend his career reconciling, setting a newly married couple — Robert Andrews, a young landowner, and Frances Carter — in a wide view of their Suffolk estate. Painted about 1750, early in the artist’s career, the canvas leaves the couple’s patch of fabric unfinished and lets the plain of fields, the stooked corn, and the summer sky claim as much of the composition as the sitters themselves. Long a favourite of the National Gallery in London, it is read today as a portrait not only of the couple but of the land, money, and ease of the Georgian gentry.