‘Thomas Gainsborough and the Modern Woman’ focuses specifically on the artist’s portraits of well-known society women. Starting with the Cincinnati Art Museum’s famous portrait of Ann Ford (1760) it opens up an entirely new angle in the study of Gainsborough’s art. Drawing us away from his predominant reputation as a landscape painter, it shows how such portraits were both an affirmation by Gainsborough of his own position as a progressive artist, on account both of the sitters themselves - they were leading artists, musicians, actresses, and intellectuals embodying the full force of the Enlightenment - and on account of how he consciously chose to show his sitters as progressive in terms of his technique and composition. This beautifully illustrated new volume also reveals how these female sitters consciously perceived themselves as progressive , by means of the particular ways in which they wished to be shown by Gainsborough in their portraits.