a market-town and river port of Lincolnshire, on the right bank of the Trent, 21 miles above its junction with the estuary of the Humber, and 16 miles N.W. of Lincoln. It consists chiefly of one long well-paved street running parallel with the river, which is here crossed by a fine stone bridge of three arches. It has a neat church erected in 1748, several dissenting places of worship, a town hall, and a small theatre. The old hall called John O'Gaunt's palace is a curious oak-timber framed building, forming three sides of a quadrangle, and having a tower 78 feet high. Gainsborough possesses a free grammar and other schools, an atheneum, savings-bank, dispensary, &c. Shipbuilding is carried on; and there are manufactures of linseed cake, ropes, malt, and tobacco. Vessels of 200 tons burden can come up to the town. The gross amount of custom duties received at the port in 1852 was £20,637. On 31st December 1853, 11 sailing vessels of 620 tons, and 5 steam-vessels of 836 tons, were registered at the port; while during that year 214 vessels of 13,292 tons entered, and 237 vessels of 12,725 cleared at the port. Market-day, Tuesday. Pop. (1851), 7506.

Thomas, a celebrated English landscape-painter, was born in 1737, at Sudbury in Suffolk. His father was a man of humble fortune, and unable to give him any but the scantiest education. The time which he ought to have spent in the school-room, he thus passed in the woods and fields, where, at an early age, he became imbued with a taste for the quiet beauties of nature, which he afterwards reproduced with so much effect in his early landscapes. He made a habit of sketching every picturesque object that struck his fancy, and before the age of twelve had acquired great facility in drawing, and some skill in colouring. At that early age he was sent to London to master his art, and supported himself by portrait-painting till his nineteenth year, when he married a lady of fortune. After his marriage he removed to Ipswich, thence to Bath; and in 1774 returned to London, where he enjoyed an extensive practice as a portrait-painter. At the foundation of the Royal Academy, Gainsborough was appointed a member of it, but does not seem to have taken any active interest in its proceedings. During the latter years of his life he suffered much from a cancer in the neck, which ultimately proved fatal, 2d August 1788.

It is as a painter of landscapes and fancy pieces that Gainsborough will be longest remembered by posterity. Sir Joshua Reynolds, indeed, in his Character of Gainsborough, says, "Whether he excelled most in portraits, landscapes, or fancy-pictures, it is difficult to determine." But the difficulty has been already solved. His portraits, it is true, were very highly valued by his contemporaries, and possessed the prime merit of being always admirable likenesses. But this was often their sole merit, for they were very frequently so roughly and carelessly finished, and scumbled in a manner so peculiar, that though they looked well at a distance, they had a blurred and indistinct appearance when viewed near at hand. However, the artist himself always regarded this as a peculiar merit in his portraits, which he always requested might be hung low in the exhibition, so as to be within reach of the closest scrutiny. But Gainsborough's real fame rests on his landscapes and fancy-pieces. His early style differed greatly from his later. In the former he copied nature in all her details with the fidelity of a photographer. In the latter he aimed at producing grand impressions by the effects of great breadth, and a judicious chiaroscuro. It is perhaps too much to claim for him, as some of his admirers have done, an equality with Rubens, Claude, or Ruysdael; but no one will now refuse to accept the verdict of Sir Joshua Reynolds, who says, that if ever this nation should produce genius sufficient to acquire to us the honourable distinction of an English school, the name of Gainsborough will be transmitted to posterity as one of the very first of that rising name.