White horses

Some photographers might have enhanced this shot by adding in some blue sky.  I don't do that sort of thing.

One of my favourite albums is Doyle Bramhall II's "Welcome" but today I listened for the first time to "Rich Man" (2016) on which my favourite track is My People.

Painting of the day is a very familiar picture by Thomas Gainsborough, painted in 1749 of a newly-married couple Mr and Mrs Andrews. Their wedding took place in Sudbury, Suffolk, the artist's home town, in 1748.  Robert Andrews was 22 and Frances Mary Carter was 16. 

It was a well-planned alliance, for sound business and social reasons. Andrews' father was a silversmith in London who also lent large sums of money at high interest rates to landowners, shipbuilders and traders.  He was one of a new wave of merchants and financiers who made England the world's leading trading nation, which led to the industrial revolution, starting just a few decades later. However, Andrews was not part of the landed gentry and wanted his family to move up in the world.  After an education at Oxford University, Andrews senior arranged for his son to marry a squire's daughter, with a dowry including a large estate - the Auburies, the scene of the painting.

Gainsborough preferred to paint portraits but, early in his career in 1749, had to take commissions for portraits. This picture is an unusual portrait for its time, mostly comprised of landscape, the couple being posed in the left-hand third of the canvass - a position which photographers will recognise. The landscape is also not one commonly painted at that time, when mythical, idealised "perfect" scenery would often exclude the details of agriculture.  In this scene, the enclosed field of sheep was not only uncommon in paintings; it was also an example of modern agricultural practice.

To my eyes, the rather smug image of Robert Andrews, in his country squire's outfit, with his hunting gun and dog, with his pretty, solemn, young and above all "landed" wife, is showing-off his exalted status, his estate and its new its new model farm.