An Unknown Couple in a Landscape

This painting by Thomas Gainsborough double portrait around the middle of the 18th century, combining his two great loves: portraiture and landscape. An elegantly dressed couple poses before a rural English setting with trees and open sky. The sitters' identities have been lost to history, giving rise to the painting's title.

Gainsborough often complained that portrait commissions kept him from his preferred subject of landscape painting. In works like this, he merged both interests, placing his fashionable clients in idealized pastoral settings that evoked the English countryside.

The painting hangs at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London. Gainsborough, along with Reynolds, dominated British portraiture in the Georgian era. His fluid brushwork and atmospheric sensitivity influenced generations of English painters.