Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 20.djvu/368

 pair of copper wings and essayed in vain to fly, and among his other inventions were ‘a cradle which rocked itself, a cuckoo which would sing all the year round, and a wheel that turned in a still bucket of water.’ He also painted, and was about to sail to the East Indies to prove an invention for the discovery of longitude, when he died in London. The second brother, Humphry, was a dissenting minister at Henley-on-Thames, who declined to take orders though offered preferment in the church of England. His leisure hours were given to mechanics, and his experiments upon the steam engine are said to have been far in advance of his time. According to Fulcher his friends declared that Watt owed to him the plan of condensing the steam in a separate vessel. He invented a fireproof box, the utility of which was proved by a fire in a friend's house, and for a tide-mill of his invention he obtained a premium of 50l. from the Society for the Encouragement of Arts. A curious sundial of his contrivance is in the British Museum.

Thomas alone, of all the sons, cost his parents little. He supported himself after he was eighteen. From the first his bent towards art was decided. An intense love of nature and a facility for taking likenesses seem to have been born in him. His only known encouragement from without came from his mother, who was ‘a woman of well-cultured mind, and, amongst other accomplishments, excelled in flower-painting.’ He was sent to his uncle's grammar school, but spent all his holidays in sketching rambles. He told Thicknesse that ‘there was not a picturesque clump of trees, nor even a single tree of any beauty, no, nor hedgerow, stem or post,’ in or around his native town, which was not from his earliest years treasured in his memory. On one occasion he successfully forged his father's handwriting to a strip of paper bearing the words ‘Give Tom a holiday.’ When the fraud was discovered his father promptly prophesied that ‘Tom will one day be hanged,’ and, on seeing how the boy had employed the stolen time, declared that ‘Tom will be a genius.’ The lad one morning sketched the face of a man peeping over the fence of his father's (or a friend's) orchard. The man took to his heels when Gainsborough interrupted his assault upon a pear tree, but the sketch already taken was sufficient to identify the thief. From this sketch he afterwards painted a picture which was exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1885. It is on a board cut to the outline of the head, and when he went to Ipswich he set it up on the garden palings, to the deception of many, including Philip Thicknesse, who took it for a real man, and was so pleased that he called on the artist.

‘At ten years old,’ says Allan Cunningham, ‘Gainsborough had made some progress in sketching, and at twelve was a confirmed painter,’ and in his fifteenth year he was sent to London to the care of a silversmith ‘of some taste,’ to whom, according to a writer in the ‘Gentleman's Magazine,’ he always acknowledged great obligations. For some time he studied under Gravelot, the French engraver, at his house in James Street, Covent Garden, where he met Charles Grignon, who assisted him in his first attempts at etching. Here he acquired the skill which enabled him to etch the few plates (about eighteen) and the three aquatints which are mentioned in Bryan's ‘Dictionary’ (Graves). Fifteen of the etchings were published after his death by Boydell. He was employed by Gravelot in designing ornamental borders for Houbraken's portraits, and also by Alderman Boydell, but after entering the St. Martin's Lane Academy he left Gravelot's studio for that of Frank Hayman [q. v.] After three years under Hayman he hired rooms in Hatton Garden, where he painted landscapes for dealers at low prices, and portraits for three to five guineas. He also practised modelling of animals. After a year thus spent without very satisfactory results he returned to Sudbury in 1745.

He now continued his study of landscape and fell in love with Miss Margaret Burr, a beautiful girl with an annuity of 200l. a year, whom he soon married, being at that time nineteen years old, and one year older than his bride. According to the earlier biographers of the artist much mystery surrounded this young lady and the source of her annuity. It was said that she was the daughter of an exiled prince, or of the Duke of Bedford, and that the pair met accidentally ‘in one of Gainsborough's pictorial excursions,’ but even according to Fulcher her brother was a commercial traveller in the employ of Gainsborough's father, and her father, it is now asserted, was a partner in the business.

The newly married couple, after a brief residence in Friar Street, Sudbury, hired a small house in Brook Street, Ipswich, at a yearly rent of 6l. Here the artist made the acquaintance of Joshua Kirby [q. v.], who became his warm friend, and placed his son William with him when he went to London. He also appears to have had another pupil here, where he remained till 1760, gradually improving in skill and position. It was in 1754 that he met Philip Thicknesse, his earliest biographer, then lieutenant-governor