I tried to read this book, a monograph published around the turn of the 20th century. However, as I read the biography of Gainsborough, I found that some of the pages were not cut correctly, which means that I could not open some of the pages. Fine, I thought when I got to the first one, I’ll skip this pages and keep going. As I continued, there were several such pages which rendered reading of the biography pretty tough.
So I looked at the pictures. English portraiture. Pretty boring stuff. I did come away with the fact that England didn’t really produce a lot of known painters and that they liked portraits.
I also learned that my sainted mother did a report on Gainsborough in the third grade, ca. 1957, and remembered one of his paintings. Ah, the strange, meandering pathways to knowledge.