Oliver Arditi's review of The Painter's Daughters

5/5: Emily Howes picked out a couple of individuals forgotten by history, prompted perhaps by the vividness of the portraits their father painted of them. The Painter's daughters takes its title from Thomas Gainsborough's painting 'The Painter's daughters chasing a butterfly', and it tells a story of those two women, from early childhood until the end of their lives. It is one version of them, making several assumptions that a historian would question, but it is in many ways extremely plausible. As a representation of the experience of middle-class women in eighteenth century England, it is rema...