Enfilade

Left to right: Thomas Gainsborough, Portraits of Elizabeth Tugwell and Thomas Tugwell, each ca. 1763, oil on canvas; Paul Graham, Ryo, Japan, 1995, colour coupler print (Courtesy the artist and Anthony Reynolds); Joy Labinjo, She is my wife and truly best part, 2022, oil on canvas (Courtesy Tiwani Contemporary).

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Now on view at No. 1 Royal Crescent:

Being There
No. 1 Royal Crescent, Bath, 14 September 2024 – 23 February 2025

Curated by Ingrid Swenson

Our new exhibition Being There features four recently acquired portraits by Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) and eighteen portraits by contemporary artists. 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 are presented as key components of a kaleidoscopic group exhibition of portraiture featuring eighteen 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, and Shaqúelle Whyte.

Painted around 1763, the Gainsborough portraits depict members of the prominent Tugwell family from Bradford on Avon: clothier Humphrey Tugwell and his wife Elizabeth, along with their sons William and Thomas. It is exceptionally rare for a set of four portraits of members of the same family by 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. Housed in their original frames carved by Carlo Maratta, these four portraits must be seen in person to be fully appreciated!

The four Gainsborough portraits were Accepted in lieu of Inheritance tax by HM Government in 2024 and allocated to Bath Preservation Trust.