Thomas Gainsborough R.A. 1727 - 1788

The present drawing is a preparatory work for Gainsborough's oil painting, Charity Relieving Distress, which was first exhibited as The Beggars at Schomberg house, Gainsborough's home in Pall Mall, in 1784, and is now in a Private Collection.  This study concentrates on the group of figures on the left of the composition - a beggar woman with her children.   It has been suggested by Martin Postle that ironically, it is the figure of the peasant woman burdened with children that is the allegory of Charity (and not the servant girl in the painting) as she resembles the figure of Charity designed only a few years earlier by Sir Joshua Reynolds for a painted glass window at New College Oxford.  Moreover, the small child tugging at his mother's skirts in Gainsborough's preparatory study and in the finished oil painting is identical to the child in Reynold's Charity (see Martin Postle, Angels and Urchins - The Fancy Picture in 18th Century British Art, 1998, p.93).     

The present drawing fits into the series of chalk studies of beggars, influenced by the Spanish artist Murillo, which Gainsborough executed in the early 1780's.  Other similar studies are in the Henry E.Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, Birmingham City Art Museum and Art Gallery, the Ashmolean Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum