The Gravenor Family

Painted for the sitter, John Gravenor, an apothecary and local politician of Suffolk, whose family the canvas stayed with until Sotheby & Co. sold it in 1972; the gallery records the earlier title under which it was long known, Mr. and Mrs. John Gravenor and their Daughters, Elizabeth and Dorothea. Gainsborough, born at Sudbury in 1727, built his early practice on just such commissions from the professional classes of his native county before the move to Bath, and the museum notes that portraiture — the trade he called the “face way” — supported the landscape painting he preferred. The picture came to New Haven in 1977 with the Paul Mellon collection.