A Right Royal Face-Off A Georgian Comedy Featuring Thomas Gainsborough and Another Painter

It is 1777, and England’s second-greatest portrait artist, Thomas Gainsborough, has a thriving practice a stone’s thrown from London’s royal palaces, while the press talks up his rivalry with Sir Joshua Reynolds, the pedantic theoretician who is the top dog of British portraiture. Fonder of the low life than high society, Gainsborough loathes pandering to the grandees who sit for him. However, he changes his tune when he is commissioned to paint King George III, his German queen and their vast family. He discovers a taste for royal company—but who will be chosen as court painter, Tom or Sir Joshua? Meanwhile, two and a half centuries later, a badly damaged painting turns up on a downmarket antiques TV show being filmed in Suffolk. Could the monstrosity really be, as its eccentric owner claims, a Gainsborough? If so, who is the sitter? And why does he have donkey’s ears?

Simon Edge was editor of Capital Gay, a gossip columnist for Evening Standard anda feature writer and theatre critic for Daily Express.