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The English high society of the eighteen century will meet here, in the halls of the Palazzo dei Diamanti, to celebrate the birth of the European currency.

It is a Grand Tour in every respect, a courtesy call waiting for its descendants too, reassured about its future partners' reliability, to decide to break their age-old isolation and to join the new club. After all, one can actually breath Europe in the works that our museums and town councillorships are choosing to exhibit.
A noble father of Impressionism called Camille Pissarro recently ended his triumphal Italian tour in Ferrara and another giant of all times' painting, the English Thomas Gainsborough, is getting ready to be just as clamorously successful with this gallery of his elegant countrymen.

The overall number of masterpieces here collected for the first time after the far, memorable London and Paris exhibitions, shows in the best possible way the new and successful measure of interpretation of a man who can be perceived in his portraits, overwhelmed with fineness and sensibility, gladdened by an intriguing chromatic unison and by the soothing harmony of the English landscape.
Gainsborough, in fact, unlike most of his colleagues across the Channel, besides being a considerable portrait painter, also and chiefly was a profound singer of the English countryside, a lover of nature who was able to pour his personality's most spontaneous and happiest expressions when he painted landscapes.

For this reason, when we run across those gentlemen and gentlewomen who are so deeply imbued with a noble and self-possessed grace, when we stop with them in the shade of a beech, almost stroking the tawny coat of a terrier or a setter glowing with happiness under the good-natured protection of such masters,

we feel how the deep originality in Gainsborough's portraits is actually due to the peculiar, pressing relationship between the figures and the surrounding landscape, those soft, airy undulations of Suffolk and East Anglia that the English master never uses as a mere back-drop but that almost become the composition's chief elements.
When we see this hit parade of the English high society, we clearly cannot avoid noticing how Gainsborough, despite being instinctive and a hater of all rules, accepts many conventions of portraiture of his time.
At the same time, however, it is clear how the artist still manages to keep a note of timorous and vibrating humanity, a desire of likelihood that might express the most important features of the subject's personality and character - both with moderation and spontaneous transport - without depressing it.
Thus, in many of his womanly figures, it is easy to perceive a woman behind a great dame, it is possible to perceive the intimacy of a secret dream, of a gesture in a glance, a slightly mischievous shadow can surface from a position or the fold of the lips.
And it is all due to a technical virtuosity that the Ferrara's exhibition shows us along with the numerous preparatory studies as well as the creative process highlighting the inspiration spontaneity, the immediacy of the pictorial behaviour and the entire exuberant charge of

Thomas Gainsborough's human warmth.
A perfect Rococo interpreter who is here rightly considered as the forerunner of modern painting thanks to his skin-deep, already exquisitely romantic, sensibility.

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