Mr and Mrs Carter is one of Thomas Gainsborough’s earliest works, possibly painted in 1747–8 when he was living in London but making regular summer trips to his home town of Sudbury, on the Essex/Suffolk border. The sitters, William Carter of Ballingdon-cum-Brundon, just outside Sudbury, and his wife Frances, were the parents of Frances Andrews who sits genteelly alongside her husband in Gainsborough’s celebrated Mr and Mrs Andrews (National Gallery). In the latter, spreading into the distance is the harvest landscape of their Essex estate, Auberies, in Bulmer, the parish adjoining Ballingdon. William Carter was a figure of some substance in the locality. A merchant and extensive landowner, he would have been known to Gainsborough whose own father had been a merchant and whose family worshipped at the same church, All Saints in Sudbury. Despite the odd disproportion between husband and wife, which suggests a youthful work, the painting is an important one in the context of Gainsborough’s early patronage and his local Sudbury connections.