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SUDBURY has doubled in size in the last thirty years, to become easily the most important town in this part of the Stour Valley. A handful of timber-framed houses hark back to its days of wool-trade prosperity, but its three Perpendicular churches were underwritten by another local industry, silk weaving, which survives on a small scale to this day. Sudbury's most famous export, however, is Thomas Gainsborough , the leading English portraitist of the eighteenth century, whose statue, with brush and palette, stands on Market Hill, the town's predominantly Victorian market place. A superb collection of the artist's work is on display a few yards away in the house where he was born - Gainsborough's House , at 46 Gainsborough St (April-Oct Tues-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun 2-5pm; Nov-March Tues-Sat 10am-4pm, Sun 2-4pm; GBP3). Gainsborough left Sudbury when he was just 13, moving to London where he was apprenticed to an engraver, but it seems he was soon moonlighting and the earliest of his surviving portrait paintings - his Boy and Girl , a remarkably self-assured work dated to 1744 - is displayed here. In 1752, Gainsborough moved on to Ipswich, where he quickly established himself as a portrait painter to the Suffolk gentry with one of his specialities being wonderful "conversation pieces", so-called because the sitters engage in polite chitchat - or genteel activity - with a landscape as the backdrop. Seven years in Ipswich was followed by a move up-market to Bath, where he painted high society figures, as he did when he moved on to London in 1774. Examples of Gainsborough's later work exhibited here include the Portrait of Harriet, Viscountess Tracy (1763) and the particularly striking Portrait of Abel Moysey, MP (1771). Sudbury is just seven miles northwest of Nayland - and twice that from Colchester - along the A134. It's accessible by train from Colchester (for some services, change at Marks Tey) and is the hub of bus services to and from neighbouring towns and villages including Colchester and Ipswich. Once you've seen Gainsborough's house, though, there's little reason to hang around. If you do decide to stay, the tourist office in the town hall on Market Hill (April-Sept Mon-Fri 9am-5pm & Sat 10am-4.45pm; Oct-March Mon-Fri 9am-5pm & Sat 10am-2.45pm; tel 01787/881320, sudburytic@babergh.gov.uk ) can provide accommodation details.
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