Last Saturday, the baptismal day of Thomas Gains- borough in
1727—the exact day of his birth is unknown —was celebrated at Sudbury in Suffolk. It is a very curious and suggestive fact that those very great and characteristic English landscape painters, Constable, Gainsborough and Cromc, all came from East Anglia. Many people, perhaps most people, would call East Anglia a dull part of England, but it was the restrained graces of East Anglian landscapes that moved an extreme imaginative response in these Englishmen. Gainsborough preferred landscape painting to portraiture, and it will always be a subject of dispute whether he excelled more in his favourite medium. At all events, in his landscapes he'wrought a great and abiding mystery ; there is never sentimentality in them as there is never an attempt at a forced grandeur, yet there is unfailingly a beauty, a wistfulness and a rhythm that search the heart and make the spectator feel as though he were dreaming of his childhood. Gainsborough said that he painted one of his portraits to music. That no doubt was an exception, but music was running through his brain when he painted them all.
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