ABSTRACT
Hopes of fame and fortune drew them to London. Carl Friedrich Abel was born in 1723 at Cöthen in the principality of Anhalt, Johann Christian Bach in 1735 at nearby Leipzig in the Electorate of Saxony, and Thomas Gainsborough in 1727 at Sudbury in Suffolk, near the coast of the North Sea. They became friends in England during the 1760s. The two Germans were court-trained and widely traveled. Gainsborough made only one Continental trip that can be documented, not to Paris, but to Antwerp, the city of Rubens and Van Dyck, in October 1783. Johann Sebastian Bach's youngest son, John Christian Bach, as he was known in England, was the first to die, in 1782, followed by Abel in 1787 and Gainsborough in 1788, all at London.
