Shown from the waist up, a young, pale-skinned woman with her gray hair piled high atop her head is lit starkly against a dark background in this vertical portrait painting. The woman’s shoulders are angled to our left.

Mrs. Paul Cobb Methuen

Thomas Gainsborough (British, 1727–1788)

Date: c. 1776/1777
Medium: oil on canvas
Size: 33 × 28 in (84 × 71 cm)
Museum: National Gallery of Art, Washington, accession 1942.9.20. See the museum’s record
Credit: Widener Collection

Public domain image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art (Open Access, CC0).

Palette

Closest wall colors:

Fits these rooms

Hang it

Pick the furniture and a print size to see it to scale on your wall.

Where Print size

Print: 16 × 20 in, filling the paper (trims 5.3 % of the picture)
Center: 58 in (147 cm) above the stair line

16 × 20 in portrait print (41 × 51 cm), centered 58 in above the stair line. Drawn to scale on a 12 × 8 ft wall.

Try it on your wall color

Default greige

Print it

Standard paper sizes that keep this painting’s proportions, the frames that fit them, and how sharp each one prints.

Paper	Filling the paper	Printed whole	Frame	Frame with a 2 in mat	Frame with a 3 in mat	Sharpness
8 × 10 in	trims 5.3 %	8 × 9½ in	8 × 10 in ready-made	12 × 14 in custom	14 × 16 in custom	621 dpi, crisp up close
16 × 20 in	trims 5.3 %	16 × 19 in	16 × 20 in ready-made	20 × 24 in ready-made	22 × 26 in custom	310 dpi, crisp up close

Sharpness is worked out from the largest file the museum offers. Above 300 dpi a print holds up at arm’s length; 150 dpi is plenty for a picture seen from across a sofa.

Download

Free for any use, including commercial: this image is public domain (CC0).

Thumbnail (WebP) 469 × 560 px from Room Paintings
Web image 706 × 843 px from National Gallery of Art
Print file 1,676 × 2,000 px from National Gallery of Art
Original file 5,208 × 6,216 px from National Gallery of Art
The museum’s record of this painting National Gallery of Art

Public domain image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art (Open Access, CC0). You may print, share, change and sell it without asking. Read what that means on our image license page, and how to get a good result in how to print a public-domain painting.