Gainsborough's House

Thomas Gainsborough, the youngest of John and Mary's nine children, lived in the house and attended Sudbury Grammar School.

Houses of the late 15th century show a type of structure closely related to the timbering visible in the Entrance Hall.

The Parlour, across the corridor from the Entrance Hall, is the only visible part of this house, to have survived, and even there the character of the room has been greatly altered by subsequent modernisations.

It was composed of clay soil mixed with about half its bulk of reeds, both leaf and stem of which were used, and which were very plentiful in East Anglia.

The interior walls would have been wainscoted with oak panelling usually "chair-high", the rest being stuccoed and covered either with wallpaper, or painted decoration.

The floors, which in the 16th century would have consisted of packed earth and ox-blood covered with herbed straw, would by this time, have been boarded with oak planks.

In the absence of proper stains and polishes, 18th century housewives had to improvise; John Wood, when commenting upon the effected of his improvements in Bath recalls that: "About the year 1727, the Boards of the Dining Room and other floors were made of a Brown Colour, with soot and small Beer, to hide the Dirt, as well as their own imperfections‚ the Chimney Pieces, Hearths and Slabbs were all of Free Stone and they were daily cleaned with a particular White-wash, which soon rendered the brown Floors like the Starry Firmament.

When the house was sold at auction, it was described as: "consisting of a most excellent Brickt Mansion... replete with every convenient Accommodation for a genteel Family, or principal Manufacturer, having upon the Premises two Buildings... 147 Feet long, with an Orchard, well planted with Fruit Trees in a high state of Perfection, which with a Flower Garden, paved Yard, and Scite of the Buildings, contain about two acres.

In the mid 1950s, Mr Doward, an English art dealer working in America who had rediscovered a Gainsborough painting, bought the house intending to live in it.

[citation needed] By October 1956, a Gainsborough's House National Appeal Committee was formed, under the Chairmanship of the Mayor of Sudbury, Councillor Arthur Essex JP.

Initially the President was the John Rous, 4th Earl of Stradbroke (Lord Lieutenant of Suffolk) and the Vice-President was the artist Sir Alfred Munnings KCVC, PPRA, who lived at nearby Dedham.

Sir Alfred Munnings hoped to encourage others to make major donations, when in 1957 he gave £1,500, the proceeds of the sale of his painting of the Queen's horse, Aureole.

Major building work was carried out in 1967 and, initially, it was hoped to raise money for an endowment for the House to be taken over by the National Trust, a scheme that was later abandoned.

The museum underwent a transformational refurbishment starting in 2019; the National Centre for Thomas Gainsborough was upgraded with a new gallery and exhibition space accompanying the artist's original home.

Gainsborough was the first important British artist to consistently paint landscape and it provided the ideal subject for his poetic vision.

There, he trained with the French painter and illustrator, Hubert-Francois Gravelot and associated with the artistic community around the St Martin's Lane Academy, which included William Hogarth (1697–1762) and Francis Hayman (1708–76).

By 1752, Gainsborough had probably exhausted the circle of potential patrons around Sudbury and moved to the larger town of Ipswich, then a flourishing port.

As a rapidly growing spa town in the West Country, Bath became an important social centre for the wealthy and fashionable, where they consulted their doctors or had their portraits painted.

His talents were in demand by more cosmopolitan and aristocratic sitters than before, and his larger studio space enabled him to paint full-lengths on a grand scale.

The growing confidence of Gainsborough as a painter from the 1760s onwards resulted not only from more sophisticated patronage but also his knowledge of the work of other artists.

While at Bath, largely for the first time, Gainsborough was able to see paintings by Van Dyck, Rubens and other Old Masters in the great collections at Wilton, Corsham Court or Longford Castle.