Thomas Gainsborough: A Country Life

This is an engaging book focusing on the earlier landscape paintings and portraits completed in Ipswich and Bath. The observations on the details of the paintings are acute and perceptive. The author illuminates with a thorough knowledge of the social mores and conventions of 18th Century England. For painters and artists, the insights on formal composition and color are instructive. The narrative text is laced with a wit, humor, and irony that perhaps one can only find in an English art historian writing about a consummate English artist. The book is also mercifully focused and short, alleviating some of the bludgeon like tediousness of many art history tomes.

Mr Belsey has truimphed with this book - it is packed with detail that is conveyed in an accessible style of writing that enables the reader to absorb information whilst, at the same time, enjoying the whole experience.