The Painter’s Daughters by Emily Howes review – Gainsborough’s girls | Fiction
Many parents wish they could freeze a moment, preserve their children just as they are, but few have Thomas Gainsborough’s miraculous skill to achieve it. He painted his daughters Mary and Margaret – Molly and Peggy – with adoration, pride and sometimes anxiety, capturing, as Peggy, the narrator of The Painter’s Daughters puts it, a “closeness so thick you can feel it, our gaze always steady”.It’s ambitious to draw fiction from such beloved and well-known portraits, but Howes’s fictionalised Molly and Peggy don’t pale in…