A Georgian Entertainment featuring Tho’s Gainsborough and Another Painter.
It is 1777, and England’s second-greatest portrait artist, Thomas Gainsborough, has a thriving practice a stone’s throw from London’s royal palaces. Meanwhile, the press talks up his rivalry with Sir Joshua Reynolds, the pedantic theoretician who is the top dog of British portraiture.
Gainsborough loathes pandering to grand sitters, but he changes his tune when he is commissioned to paint King George III and his large family. In their final, most bitter competition, who will be chosen as court painter, Tom or Sir Joshua?
Two and a half centuries later, a badly damaged painting turns up on a downmarket TV antiques show being filmed in Suffolk. Could the monstrosity really be, as its eccentric owner claims, a Gainsborough? If so, who is the sitter? And why does he have donkey’s ears?
Mixing ancient and modern as he did in his acclaimed debut The Hopkins Conundrum, Simon Edge takes aim at fakery and pretension in this highly original celebration of one of our greatest artists.
‘I loved this book, a laugh-out-loud contemporary satire skewering today’s tired reality TV formats married with a tale of vicious rivalry in the world of 18th century royal portraiture. Simon Edge manages to pin asses ears onto the lot of them, to great comic effect’
Liz Trenow
14 x 20 cm
Paperback
288 pages
Published by Lightning Books, 2019
All purchases support Gainsborough’s House