![]() ![]() ![]() Perhaps it was at his suggestion that Gainsborough altered the seascape. A painting in the National Gallery in Victoria shares many features with Burney’s sketch, but not all of them. Indeed, in addition to the seascape and two portraits he commissioned from Gainsborough in 1783, he probably purchased a pair of landscape paintings for the house shortly before his death in 1787. Palmer was the principal agent to the Duke of Bedford whose grandfather had commissioned a number of paintings from Gainsborough in the 1750s and 1760s and with an income estimated at £4000 per annum, Palmer was able to acquire his own estate in Berkshire, where he built a new house Holme Park during the 1780s, and he was buying Gainsborough’s work to decorate its principal rooms. Presumably the first owner of the painting, Robert Palmer, saw the canvas in the exhibition before it was returned to the artist’s studio in Pall Mall. On the right is the coast and in the foreground figures go about their business silhouetted against the water. ![]()
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