English painter Thomas Gainsborough is known as a portrait and landscape painter. He often made commissioned portraits of representatives of the aristocracy against the backdrop of nature. His characters are having a leisurely conversation under the canopy of sprawling trees. “A Conversation in the Park” is reminiscent of the gallant paintings of the Frenchman Antoine Watteau, who also liked to depict the solitary walks of lovers in shady parks.

The master’s characters are a little theatrical, they seem to be actors playing a sentimental play against the backdrop of an elegantly painted stage scenery with a white-stone arbor-rotunda in the depths of the composition. Landscape was Gainsborough’s favorite genre. Not yet practicing, like his contemporaries, work from nature, the artist made models of the future canvas for the harmonious arrangement of objects on a plane. He used various natural materials: sand, coal, moss.