Lead Review (The Painter’s Daughters)
- Book: The Painter’s Daughters
- Location: Bath
- Author: Emily Howes
The novel opens in 1759 and this is the fictional story of Thomas Gainsborough’s daughters and the close relationship that evolved early on between the two sisters. Their father was the renowned painter of people and landscapes, using feathery brushstrokes and saturated colour in his art. He moved his family from Ipswich on the advice of his friend and ended up in Bath, where business for painters was starting to boom and entrance into society for his daughters would hopefully be a given. His oftentimes scant earnings in the early days meant that the girls would have to marry well in order to ensure a decent standard of living in their future lives.
Peggy, the younger of the two, proved to be a resourceful girl, garnering the nickname of ‘captain’ from her father. She was grimly aware that her sister, Molly, appeared to suffer from periods of mental instability and although noted by their parents, these episodes were never really acknowledged. There are clues throughout the story as to the nature of her ‘madness’. It then fell to Peggy to ensure she took care of her sister: they shared a bedroom and by binding herself to her sister, she could monitor her night-time wanderings and be alerted to any major movement; or she directly fixed a strand of Molly’s hair to the bedpost, so that she couldn’t leave – but such was Molly’s subliminal determination to move around, that she ripped the hair from her head. Molly also had moments of deranged behaviour in public spaces, which Peggy had to manage. The fear was that Molly would be sent to Bedlam, where there was a high level of mistreatment. The trajectory of their lives changes abruptly when the notion of love – infatuation, even – rears its head.
Peggy thus became Molly’s protector and carer, and the two established an unhealthy attachment that held well into their adult years. Their mother had quite a sense of grandeur, decorum and expectations that were clearly well-embedded within her psyche – The Gainsborough family, especially through the mother’s side, is “an illusion of something, its substance hard to grasp…” – and these were often at odds with the reality of family life that had developed, creating a dissonance and unrealistic pressures. The seeming perfection of their lives was captured in the portraits painted of the two sisters by their father, quite the latter day Social Media phenomenon, where there is terrible dissonance between what is portrayed and what actually goes on behind the glamorous front.
Alongside the story of the two sisters was another, to wit the story of Meg, who was working in a pub and she had a brief liaison with a high ranking member of the royal family. This seemed a little random, as, at times, the reader was almost hijacked into her story, away from the siblings, but the threads do all come together at the end of the novel.
There are plenty of characters who make appearances throughout the story, people who appeared in Gainsborough’s portraits and the muddy sense of the city of Bath and the palanquin bearers and streets teaming with people and effluence is evocatively drawn.
This is a beautifully written and engaging novel. I particularly enjoyed it because I love novels that have art at their heart.
Please wait...
