96 THOMAS The sitter and her child are unknown, but it is likely that the two figures were intended GAINSBOROUGH as portraits of individuals from the English aristocracy. The large picture hat and British, 1727­1788 flamboyant hairstyle were in vogue around 1785­90. According to Gainsborough's Lady Walking in a Garden friend William Pearce, the artist went on a sketching trip to Saint James's Park in with a Child London to draw the "high­dressed and fashionable ladies" in order to prepare his Black chalk with stumping on never­executed picture of The Richmond Water­Walk (so called from the promenade light­brown paper, heightened with white pastel along the Thames at Richmond, a few miles west of London), which was to show 50.5 x 22.1 cm (19 7/8 x 8 11/16 in.) "Richmond Water­Walk, or Windsor—the figures all portraits." This was commissioned 96.GB.13 around 1785 by King George III as a companion to The Mall in Saint James's Park (New York, Frick Collection), a magnificent picture showing elegantly dressed ladies parading along this wooded walk, "all aflutter, like a lady's fan," as one commentator put it. This drawing, along with two in the British Museum, London, and one in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, were probably done from life and are among Gainsborough's greatest figure drawings, with this arguably being the finest of the group. Much the same magical touch as in his best painted work is seen here. The liveliness of the sweeps of charcoal and white highlight is a metaphor for the woman's movement—the turn of her head, the lightness of her step, even the sense of breeze blowing her skirts and gently agitating the surrounding foliage. Gainsborough's sophisticated and elegant style of portraiture is epitomized by The Blue Boy (San Marino, Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens). His later portraits show a sensitive harmonization of human and natural forms united by brushwork of extraordinary inventiveness and freedom. BRITISH SCHOOL 121