This engaging portrait by Thomas Gainsborough depicts two young sisters, believed to be Maria and Amelia Goddard, daughters of the Rev. William Goddard (c. 1749–1798) and his wife Jenny (1753–1797). Their mother was the daughter of General Sir Robert Sloper (1729–1802), of West Woodhay, in Berkshire, who had been Commander-in-Chief of the Army in India. Dressed in matching white muslin shifts with blue sashes, they stand on what appears to be a terrace, with three monumental columns rising behind and the hint of a distant landscape beyond. The pair, with their arms linked in a touching familial bond, command our attention. The elder, Maria, born in 1779, looks straight ahead, directly engaging the viewer; whilst her younger sister, Amelia, born in 1781, gazes enquiringly up to the left, towards something unseen, beyond the picture plane. Their bodies are closely intertwined, the younger girl pressing slightly into her elder sister, as if seeking protection, creating a tender intimacy and lending the composition an enigmatic charge.

Likely commissioned from Gainsborough by the children’s grandfather and painted in the last year of the artist’s life, this portrait is painted with characteristically loose, energetic brushstrokes, indicative of an artist at the height of his creative powers, with the experimental confidence of a lifetime of experience behind him. This is particularly apparent in the lively handling of the drapery, which effortlessly captures the diaphanous texture of loose, gauzy muslin; as well as in the rapid, globular application of paint in the autumnal foliage on the right, with its areas of thick, impasted medium clearly showing the teeth of the brush. It is a tour-de-force, one of the most expressive artists of the eighteenth century, who was celebrated for the often-miraculous speed of his execution, in the assurance of his full maturity.

The motif of a close bond between siblings is one that characterises some of Gainsborough’s most cherished portraits and one which seems to have particularly resonated with him. Indeed, both the subject and emotional charge here are strongly reminiscent of the artist’s deeply touching portrait of his own daughters, Mary and Margaret, painted nearly thirty years earlier (National Gallery, London; fig. 1). The composition is wholly successful, with its three-quarter length format and close framing of the subject by the columns, creating an aesthetic intensity. The painting also bears close comparison with Gainsborough’s Portrait of Elizabeth and Mary Linley of circa 1772 (Dulwich Picture Gallery, London; fig. 2); two older and more formally dressed sisters, but none-the-less equally intimate in their co-dependent pose; with the figure on the right engaging the viewer directly, whilst the other gazes wistfully off towards an unseen object upper left. Both works share a similarly engaging sense of ambiguity that is both beguiling and intriguing. It draws us in, involving us as viewers in the narrative of the painting, though we know not exactly what that narrative is.

However, the painting we see today was not, in fact, the artist’s original intention. It is one of three surviving fragments of a much larger painting, which must surely rank among Gainsborough’s most ambitious and unusual compositions. The original painting, which measured 249 x 183 cm. (98 x 72 in.), is known only through a black-and-white photograph taken when the painting was with Agnew’s in 1920 (fig. 3). It depicted a spiritualized female figure, perhaps the wife of their grandfather, upper left, appearing in a cloud as a vision from the heavens, accompanied by two cherubs. From her outstretched arm she sprinkled rose petals to the ground (a symbol of enduring love), whilst the two girls appeared lower right, framed by columns, set in an extensive woodland landscape with a pool in the middle distance.

This ‘most unusual picture’, to use Susan Sloman’s words, appears, as both Retford and Belsey commented, unanticipated in Gainsborough’s œuvre and the idea that he, of all British portraitists, should paint someone ‘spiritualized’ in this manner is surprising.¹ However, as Sloman has pointed out, in the decade in which it was created a number of both British and Continental artists had attempted to paint dialogues between the living and the dead, or figures moving from life to death. In 1780 Batoni had produced An Allegory of the Death of Two Children of Ferdinand IV (Royal Palace of Caserta, Naples), showing two of the King’s children ascending to heaven in the arms of a winged angel, leaving their grieving mother on earth. Similarly, Benjamin West had painted The Apotheosis of the Princes Alfred and Octavius in 1783, memorialising the much lamented deaths of King George III and Queen Charlotte’s two youngest sons, with Prince Octavius being welcomed into heaven by his brother Alfred, who had died the year before him; whilst Matthew William Peters had exhibited An Angel carrying the spirit of a child to Paradise at the Royal Academy in 1782.

Sloman suggests that Gainsborough took inspiration for the composition from Reynolds’ Portrait of Lady Blake as Juno, which had been exhibited at the inaugural Royal Academy exhibition in 1769 and was engraved in mezzotint by John Dixon (fig. 4). Gainsborough owned at least sixty prints after portraits by Reynolds and was never above borrowing ideas from his rival.² Belsey has also suggested that the notion of mixing the living and the dead may have come from Van Dyck’s Pembroke Family at Wilton, which Gainsborough copied in the 1760s. He also notes similarities between the figural relationship of the two girls in this surviving section of the work and the figures of St Catherine of Siena and St Olive in Van Dyck’s Virgin of the Rosary, in the Oratorio del Rosario in Palermo, the composition of which Gainsborough may have known from an important preparatory sketch for it that was in Reynolds’ collection.³ Whatever the source of inspiration, it is possible that Gainsborough’s interest in the subject was in part influenced by the artist’s religious beliefs and growing concerns for his own mortality. As Retford pointed out, Gainsborough was to die the following year, killed by a cancerous growth in his neck that he had been aware of for some time and which, at the time of his working on this commission, was proving increasingly painful and frightening.⁴ His close friend, the musician Carl Friedrich Abel, passed away that same summer and the artist, with two daughters of his own, would certainly have been preoccupied with concerns for the afterlife.

Debate has long raged about the identity of the sitters in this complex and highly unusual composition. General Sir Robert Sloper, who is thought to have commissioned the painting, married Jane Willes, daughter of Chief Justice Sir John Willes (1685–1761). She lived until 1804, however, and so cannot be the deceased lady depicted in this painting of 1787. However, Sloper also had a relationship with an unknown woman, possibly called Stokes. Belsey, in his catalogue raisonné of the artist’s portraits, suggests that it is she who is the subject of the spirit in the upper left; whilst the two girls are the children of Sloper’s eldest legitimate daughter Jenny (1753–1797). Jenny married the Rev. William Goddard (c. 1749–1798) and by him had three daughters, Maria (b. 1778), who died young, Maria Catherine (b. 1779) and Amelia (1781–1866). The latter two would have been aged eight and six at the time this portrait was painted and therefore appear to be convincing candidates, of the appropriate age, for the two girls depicted here. The fact that the painting passed down to the younger of these two girls, Amelia, after their grandfather’s death, further strengthens this identification. However, other commentators have speculated that the two girls could be the natural children of Sloper’s unknown common-law wife herself, as was reported in the contemporary press.

Shortly after being acquired by Agnew's the painting was cut up into three parts in 1921. The spiritualized female figure survives as a 30 x 25 in. canvas, though with her gestured arm removed and the cherubs excluded (fig. 5, Sotheby’s, London, 3 April 1996, lot 72). Very freely painted, on its own it has the quality of a compositional study and an ethereal beauty that equally stands on its own merit. The woodland landscape in the lower left was cut into a non-standard 41 x 30 in. canvas and retained as a standalone, upright landscape (last recorded with Ackerman and Johnson, London, October 2002); whilst the two girls, lower right, were preserved in the present work, which has been transformed into a standard English 50 x 40 in. ‘half length’ canvas. Commissioned by a loving grandfather, despite its reduction, this spectacular double portrait survives as a highly personal memento of the close relationship between two sisters, a type in which Gainsborough excelled, imbued, as it is, with a raw sentiment that is seen in much of his most admired portraiture.

¹ Sloman 2021, p. 193; Belsey 2019, p. 403.

² Sloman 2021, p. 194.

³ Belsey 2019, pp. 403–4. For Gainsborough’s copy of Van Dyck’s Pembroke Family, see Belsey 2019, no. 1091.

⁴ Retford 2010, p. 86.