What would Thomas Gainsborough have made of textile recyling stunt?

I was going to alert blog readers to the interactive Advent Calendar that features on the Suffolk Greenest County Website, and which can be found here.

However, I was completely distracted by the feature on the site showing the statue of Thomas Gainsborough in Sudbury swathed in tatty old clothing in order to promote the County's textile recycling scheme.

Poor Thomas!  Gainsborough is known to have been very interested in textiles, and his technique in painting the clothing of his subjects is remarkable.  Unlike other portraitists he painted almost all of the costumes of his sitters himself, and his magical handling of silks,  muslins and the like is thought to be at least in part due to his childhood in Sudbury where cloth and clothmaking was, and is,  a key industry.

What would he have made of his statue being dressed in what is described on the website as a 'wide variety of old and worn textiles, t shirts, scarves and hats' ?  He did have a good sense of humour, but he was not without pride, and I rather suspect that he may not have seen the point of this particular exercise.

 I cannot bring myself to reproduce the photograph which you can view here, if you must.

Much better to take a look at the lovely Lady Alston, and her wonderful ruched silk dress.  Not suprisingly the picture is in now in the Louvre in Paris, where they also know a thing or two about textiles.