I had to chivvy myself out the door this afternoon to do something - anything - after far too many days spent eating and drinking and playing board games and not once up and out for a walk or breath of fresh air.  (I spent Christmas in my natural bad-habitat with a family of night owls, all of us livening up and getting our second or third wind at 3am but regrettably not so perky before noon.)
Of course, I didn't stride out for a bracing hike today but I did manage a gentle amble from Leicester Square tube to the National Portrait Gallery (don't mock me!) where Gainsborough's Family Album proved utterly enchanting and a perfect Last Exhibition to ring out 2018.
And there were the artist's daughters, Margaret and Mary, carefree little girls chasing a butterfly in the painting we all know best ...



Playing with each other's hair ...



Then they're growing up so fast and looking serious and restrained, training to be artists themselves (a career plan that comes to nothing) because Gainsborough, who has been ill, is worrying about their future security and prospects.
Even so, he was longing to be free from 'tea drinkings, dancings, husband huntings &c' so he could devote his time to painting less lucrative landscapes and his music.



The girls do become young ladies of fashion but all that youthful joie de vivre has vanished. Mary's marriage lasts only two years and her mental health deteriorates so her younger spinster sister becomes her carer.

The daughters' story is heartbreaking but the family album embraces a vast extended family. (Even 'Scheming Jack' the ne'er do well brother, always on the scrounge, whose portrait is jokingly inscribed Gainsborow.)



There's Mrs Gainsborough - the artist's wife - seen first as a rosy-cheeked teenage bride who was pregnant on her wedding day - but fast forward and she's turned into a long-suffering matron with an irascible temper who is nevertheless a brilliant business manager for her philandering husband.



Then there's the artist's sister Sarah, all starchy frills and furbelows and social aspirations ... which made me wonder what kind of domestic bliss it was for her unpretentious carpenter husband - who looks as if he'd be perfectly happy with a pipe and a pint.





There's a sweet little niece  whose life - I hope - turned out more happily than her cousins'. And I think this is the artist's cousin's mother-in-law ... in her best bib and tucker and making the most of the family connection.



It always seems so poignant thinking, there they were - so full of life and idiosyncrasies - and now they're dead. And what on earth would they think of a straggle of visitors in a gallery on New Year's Eve more than 250 years later?

Happy New Year everyone!