By the post-war years its iconic status was established, and it was one of four paintings chosen to represent British art in an exhibition in Paris celebrating the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953.

Soon the painting began to receive hostile scrutiny as a paradigm of the paternalist and capitalist society of 18th-century England, but it remains a firm popular favourite.

[1] The work is an unusual combination of two common types of painting of the period: a double portrait, here of a recently married couple, Robert and Frances Andrews, as well as a landscape view of the English countryside.

Gainsborough was later famously given to complaining that well-paid portrait work kept him away from his true love of landscape painting, and his interest probably combined with that of his clients, a couple from two families whose main income was probably not from landowning, to make – more prominently than was normal in a portrait – a display of the country estate that had formed part of Mrs Andrews' dowry.

[4] The relatively small size of the painting, just 2 feet 3 inches (69 cm) high, is typical of both Gainsborough's portraits and landscapes at this early period.

Later he painted larger portraits approximating life-size for a grander London clientele than his early depictions of local gentry, and the landscape backgrounds he used were mostly of woods and very generalized.

As with almost all artists of the period, it was not Gainsborough's practice to paint outdoors, and Mrs Andrews did not in reality have to walk in her silk clothes across the fields to pose, one of the aspects of the work commented on disapprovingly by some modern writers.

Robert himself was born in Bulmer, Essex in 1725, and after attending Sudbury Grammar School at the same time as Gainsborough (two years younger) did, went on to University College, Oxford.

Her father also owned businesses as well as property, and had a "share of a house in the City of London" as well as a country base at Ballingdon Hall, just over the River Stour from Sudbury, and so then in Essex.

Frances wears an outfit which in fact is an informal summer suit (as we would now call it) with a separate skirt and jacket, not a dress, of a light blue similar to those that Gainsborough often gave his early female sitters, including her mother, and which may not represent any actual garment of that colour.

[14] Gainsborough had painted (probably in London) Frances's parents in his Mr and Mrs Carter of Bullingdon House, Bulmer, Essex in about 1747–1748 (now Tate Britain).

[10] The neat parallel rows of corn produced by Jethro Tull's revolutionary and controversial seed drill show that this is a thoroughly modern and efficient farm.

As such details are not typical of Gainsborough's landscapes, but rather anticipate the work of John Constable who was born nearby some 25 years later,[15] it seems likely that they were Robert Andrews's idea.

[16] The painting has been described as unusual, as an outdoor conversation piece showing the subjects against an agricultural background rather than in the gardens of their own houses,[17] but this is also seen in other early Gainsboroughs.

[19] The oak tree in front of which the Andrews stand has several connotations beyond the choice of location: Englishness, stability and continuity, and a sense of successive generations taking over the family business.

[26] In this tradition, the expensive medium of oil-on-canvas itself and the lack of farm-workers in the image are cited as further evidence,[27][28] and Mrs Andrews' somewhat stiff seated position is said to express her inferior and passive status,[29] as she is placed on display like other assets of her husband.

Mr Andrew's satisfaction in his well-kept farmlands is as nothing to the intensity of the painter's feeling for the gold and green of fields and copses, the supple curves of fertile land meeting the stately clouds".

[8][33] This was still below the $621,000 paid in 1921 by Henry Huntington to Joseph Duveen (about £148,000 at the time) for The Blue Boy, and seemed "cheap" to Gerald Reitlinger, writing in 1970, before art prices began to escalate to their present levels.