THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH, R.A. | A WOODED LANDSCAPE

H.W. Underdown;

Henry S. Reitlinger;

His sale, London, Sotheby’s, 1954, lot 146;

With Agnew’s, London;

Colin Clark (son of Kenneth Clark);

Private collection, USA.

M. Woodall, Gainsborough’s Landscape Drawings, London 1939, p. 33, no. 270;

J. Hayes, The Drawings of Thomas Gainsborough, London 1971, p. 140, no. 114, reproduced pl. 357.

London, Arts Council, Gainsborough Drawings, 1960-1961, no. 6

"‘If I were to rest his reputation upon one point, it should be on his Drawings...no man ever possessed methods so various in producing effect, and all excellent...’, so wrote Gainsborough’s friend and earlier biographer William Jackson in 1798. Gainsborough is famously understood to have drawn, not for commercial reasons, but purely for his own pleasure. With a deep-rooted love of rural England, he found solace from the pressures of his flourishing portrait painting practice by regularly escaping into the countryside around his adopted home of Bath.

The present sheet is a fine example of Gainsborough’s draughtsmanship of the 1750s. Still a young man in his 30s, he had already developed a highly sophisticated drawing technique. Of note here is the obvious confidence of line and his preoccupation with the subtle gradations of light and shade within the ancient woodland."

Mark Griffith-Jones

The drawing has been dated by Hayes to the mid-1750s. Hayes describes the pencil work as similar to the panoramic landscape at Yale (see Hayes, under Literature) but the foliage in the present work is more rounded and less angular treatment making it closer in character to the Wooded Landscape with Donkeys in the Morgan Library and Museum, New York (Hayes, 1971, no. 111). "‘If I were to rest his reputation upon one point, it should be on his Drawings...no man ever possessed methods so various in producing effect, and all excellent...’, so wrote Gainsborough’s friend and earlier biographer William Jackson in 1798. Gainsborough is famously understood to have drawn, not for commercial reasons, but purely for his own pleasure. With a deep-rooted love of rural England, he found solace from the pressures of his flourishing portrait painting practice by regularly escaping into the countryside around his adopted home of Bath.