Gainsborough composed landscape scenes by building tabletop models from broccoli and cauliflower for trees, lumps of coal for hills, and mirrors for water. He painted from these arrangements in his studio. He said he was sick of portraits and wished he could walk off with his viol-da-gamba to paint landscapes. Portraits paid the bills. Landscapes were what he loved.

He was born in Sudbury, Suffolk, in 1727. His father went bankrupt in 1733. He moved to London as a teenager and trained under the French engraver Hubert-Francois Gravelot. By his thirties he was one of the two dominant portrait painters in Georgian England, the other being Joshua Reynolds. The rivalry with Reynolds defined both their careers.

The Blue Boy is probably his most famous painting, though he would have preferred to be remembered for his landscapes. On his deathbed he reconciled with Reynolds. Reynolds later wrote that the Royal Academy had lost one of its greatest ornaments. Gainsborough died in 1788, aged sixty-one.