Mr and Mrs Andrews is an oil on canvas portrait of about 1750 by Thomas Gainsborough, now in the National Gallery, London. Today it is one of his most famous works, but it remained in the family of the sitters until 1960 and was very little known before it appeared in an exhibition in Ipswich in 1927, after which it was regularly requested for other exhibitions in Britain and abroad, and praised by critics for its charm and freshness. By the post-war years its iconic status was established, and it was one of four paintings chosen to represent British art in an exhibition in Paris celebrating the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. Soon the painting began to receive hostile scrutiny as a paradigm of the paternalist and capitalist society of 18th-century England, but it remains a firm popular favourite.
In the rich and nuanced world of art, this is filed under “Rococo”.
If that’s the case, then Gainsborough has got to be my favorite Rococo painter of them all.
After a slow start compared to the rest of Europe, this is when painting in the UK was reaching its’ stride, was on the cusp of producing a truly monumental figure in the history of art, and who just might be the greatest of them all: J.M.W. Turner.