1785
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Mrs. Sarah Siddons is a 1785 by Thomas Gainsborough, a Romanticism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
You see a woman in a dark dress, her face glowing against a stormy sky. She looks calm but powerful, like she’s about to step off the canvas. This is Sarah Siddons, a famous actress in 1700s England. Gainsborough painted her quickly—just one sitting—because he wanted to show her at an exhibition, not for a paying client. The loose brushstrokes make her feel alive, not stiff like most portraits of the time. If you like this, look up other portraits from england, 18th century. They’ll show you how artists painted people with personality, not just fancy clothes.
Although Thomas Gainsborough produced about a thousand portraits in oil, the artist typically worked directly on the canvas rather than making preparatory drawings of his sitters. This study, so closely related to the artist’s finished painting of the famous actress Mrs. Sarah Siddons, is highly unusual. One scholar has hypothesized that because the portrait was not made on commission but conceived for an exhibition in his studio, Gainsborough may have had only a single sitting with the celebrated actress, and knew he would he would have to rely on the drawing as a basis for the finished work.
The sitter for this portrait, Sarah Siddons, was the subject of a competition between Thomas Gainsborough and his rival Sir Joshua Reynolds, who exhibited a portrait of the actress at the Royal Academy the year before this drawing was made.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Thomas Gainsborough (; 14 May 1727 (baptised) – 2 August 1788) was an English painter, draughtsman and printmaker who specialised in portrait and landscape painting.
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