The Painter’s Daughters Chasing a Butterfly

Thomas Gainsborough painted his daughters Molly and Mary reaching toward a butterfly in a work of remarkable intimacy and freedom. The painting remained in the artist’s studio, unfinished and uncommissioned, and it shows a side of Gainsborough that his formal portraits rarely reveal: the quick, feathery brushwork and the tender observation of his own children’s absorbed play. It is one of the most beloved images of childhood in eighteenth-century British art.