This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
A New Exhibition
Come and see our new exhibition Being There, featuring four recently acquired Thomas Gainsborough portraits. The exhibition is the first in The Gallery at No.1 Royal Crescent’s ambitious new programme of contemporary art exhibitions.
The four Gainsborough paintings will be presented as key components of a kaleidoscopic group exhibition of portraiture featuring 18 contemporary British artists selected by guest curator Ingrid Swenson MBE. The title for the exhibition, Being There is intended to invite visitors to reflect on the experience of artists and their sitters or subject in the act of making the artwork, and to consider what similarities and differences there may be for the role of the artist in Gainsborough’s time and today. Artists in Being There are Michael Armitage, Frank Auerbach, Sarah Ball, Richard Billingham, Glenn Brown, Brian Dawn Chalkley, Kaye Donachie, Paul Graham, Maggi Hambling, David Hockney, Claudette Johnson, Chantal Joffe, Lucy Jones, Joy Labinjo, Melanie Manchot, Celia Paul, Gillian Wearing, Shaqúelle Whyte
About the Thomas Gainsborough portraits
The four portraits by artist Thomas Gainsborough, painted circa 1763, depict members of the prominent Tugwell family from Bradford on Avon: clothier Humphrey Tugwell, his wife, Elizabeth and sons William and Thomas.
It is exceptionally rare for a set of four portraits of members of the same family by Thomas Gainsborough to survive together. Rarer still is the fact that the sitters are not aristocratic visitors to fashionable Bath, but middle-class manufacturers from a small West Country town.
The suite of portraits is remarkable for capturing two generations of a wealthy, upwardly mobile manufacturing family. Few comparable sets of portraits by Gainsborough survive, making these pre-eminent depictions of middle-class sitters and ones with strong local significance to the story of Bradford on Avon.
These four portraits, housed in their original carved Carlo Maratta frames, must be seen in person to be fully appreciated! Tickets released until 3rd November at present.
Buy Tickets
The four Gainsborough portraits were Accepted in lieu of Inheritance tax by HM Government in 2024 and allocated to Bath Preservation Trust.