To me, however, Gainsborough has greater charm than Constable, partly, perhaps, because of the extraordinary fascination of his portraits of persons. The reference here is not to the fashionable portrait painter of Bath, but to the later days wherein he limned the features of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (Heaven forbid that I should enter into the obvious pitfall of discussion which yawns for the unwary here), of Maria Linley and her brother (it is at Knole and a proud possession of Lord Sackville), of Mrs. Sheridan, of Mrs. Siddons, and of the Blue Boy. The model for the Blue Boy, I learn from Mr. Walter Armstrong's monograph, was the son of a wholesale ironmonger named Buttall in Greek Street, Soho. An excellent reproduction of the Mrs. Siddons, in the same monograph (Seeley 1894), lies under my eye now, and as I look at those wonderfully clean-cut and strong features, I can almost hear the painter saying, in his comic wrath, "Damn your nose, madam, there is no end to it." The story, retailed by Mr. Armstrong, makes one feel that Thomas Gainsborough was a man and a brother, and here at Sudbury it is a delight to follow the story of his early days. "He was the youngest of a family of nine, all brought up reputably and well by his father, a thrifty tradesman variously described as a milliner, a crape manufacturer and a shroud maker, who, no doubt, combined all these avocations and, said scandal, occasionally helped them out with a little quiet smuggling." The shroud-making industry was introduced by Gainsborough the elder, from Coventry, and he seems to have enjoyed a monopoly of it; "crape manufacture," as Mr. Armstrong explains, simply meant dealer in the woollen trade introduced with the Flemish weavers by Edward III into Sudbury. The house of Gainsborough's birth, once the "Black Horse," is gone. Stories of his odd but clever brothers and of his pranksome youth survive and give delight. John was an inventor in many kinds, all but a genius, never practical. Humphrey began as an inventor, but degenerated or rose to be a dissenting minister. Still, he invented a novel sundial, preserved in the British Museum, and a tide-mill for which the Society of Arts awarded him a prize of £50. Thomas, England's Gainsborough, went to the Sudbury Grammar School, cut his name in the woodwork like other boys, covered his books with sketches. Art was bubbling in him and would not be denied. His holidays were all spent in sketching, and it is related that he once took in his schoolmaster, who was also his uncle, with an exact imitation of his father's familiar request "Give Tom a holiday." At Sudbury it was, too, that he drew a lightning portrait, afterwards known as "Tom Peartree," of a peasant whom he saw gazing wistfully at his father's pear trees, which had been sadly lightened of their burden in the preceding days, and that portrait led at once to the identification of the thief who, confronted with it, confessed.