Ruskin owned a work by Gainsborough, A Country Girl ( see Works, 22 frontispiece). Gainsborough was one of his youthful idols along with Rubens, Van Dyck, Velasquez and Turner. ( Works, 35.617). He saw Gainsborough as being one of the five great painters of the English School along with Reynolds, Hogarth, Wilson and Turner, ( Works, 16.197). In Fors Clavigera Letter 76, Gainsborough becomes one of 'those seven men-quite demonstrably and indisputably giants in the domain of Art' ( this time along with Turner, Tintoretto, Velasquez, Reynolds, Titian and Veronese) ( Works, 29.89). Ruskin takes Gainsborough (and Reynolds)
for not only the topmost, but hitherto total representation; total that is to say, out of the range of landscape, and above that of satire and caricature. All that the rest can do partially, they can do perfectly. They do it, not only perfectly, but nationally; they are at once the greatest, and the Englishest, of all our school. ( Works, 33.311)