Thomas Gainsborough, R.A.

With Knoedler Gallery, London;

From whom acquired by Lady Flora Eaton (1880–1970), Toronto;

Her Estate sale, Toronto, Ward-Price Galleries, 17 November 1971, lot 237;

Where acquired by Henry Muller (1930–2017), Niagara Falls, Ontario;

By whom offered anonymously, New York, Christie’s, 9 January 1981, lot 288;

With Richard Green, London, 1982;

Mrs Mae Atkinson Benoit;

From whose Estate acquired in 1988 by the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Fredericton, Canada. 

Manitoba, Winnipeg Art Gallery, 100 Masters: Only in Canada, 10 May – 2 September 2013.

This broad panoramic landscape, with its soft, generalised treatment of the distant hills, glowing evening light and bovine foreground staffage demonstrates the strong influence on Gainsborough’s landscape painting in the late 1750s of the seventeenth-century Dutch Italianates, such as Nicolaes Berchem, Jan Both and particularly Aelbert Cuyp. In composition and handling the painting relates closely to Gainsborough's landscape formerly at Hamilton Palace that almost certainly belonged to William Beckford (Private collection, USA), whilst the painterly handling of the foreground shrubbery, as well as the soft treatment of the rocks and stones, relate to another landscape from the same date in the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio.   

Gainsborough was a lifelong admirer of Dutch Golden Age landscape painters and both his conception of the figural elements within his compositions and his evocative rendering of hazy light owe much to his study of their work. In his early years Gainsborough is even recorded as having been a restorer of Dutch paintings and by the time of his death in 1788 he had amassed a collection of at least fifteen works by the likes of Wijnants, Ruisdael, Berchem, and Pijnacker. Rica Jones, in her recent scientific analysis of Gainsborough’s early works, has shown to what lengths the artist went to recreate the effects he so admired in the work of these earlier Dutch masters, including the use of smalt for the blues of his skies and the inclusion of ground glass to help give his colours a vibrant translucency.¹ By the late 1740s Gainsborough was even preparing his canvases with an orange ground, a practice inspired by Netherlandish landscape painting, which none of his contemporaries employed. It would not be until a generation later, in the work of John Constable, that this practice would again be adopted in English landscape painting.

Despite this, however, the subject of Gainsborough’s landscapes and the figures with which he populated them, are entirely of his own creation and find equal inspiration in the artist’s first-hand knowledge of the British countryside and his encounters with real country folk. Uvedael Price, the great theorist on the Picturesque and a friend of Gainsborough, famously recorded that as a young man, when he and Gainsborough were both living in Bath, he ‘made frequent excursions with him into the country; he was a man of an eager irritable mind, though warmly attached to those he loved; of a lively and playful imagination, yet at times severe and sarcastic: but when we came to a cottage or village scene, to groups of children, or to any object of that kind which struck his fancy, I have often remarked in his countenance an expression of particular gentleness and complacency’.²

The artist himself declared, when it was suggested to him by a critic that he might paint some elevated biblical or historical scene, that though ‘there might be exceeding pretty Pictures painted’ of that type, he preferred to ‘fill up’ his pictures with ‘dirty little subjects of Coal horses & Jack asses and such figures’.³ It is quite clear that Gainsborough, who himself was born in the small country town of Sudbury, in Suffolk, and remained throughout his life a countryman at heart, identified personally with these rural figures, who represented in his mind an idyllic existence and freedom, for which he longed himself, and found in them his true inspiration.

During his lifetime Gainsborough made his living through portraiture, or as the artist himself referred to it ‘the curs’d face business’. Painting landscape, however, was his pleasure. In an often-quoted letter to his friend, the organist and composer William Jackson, Gainsborough, who was a keen and talented musician himself, wrote from Bath in 1768 complaining: ‘I am sick of portraits and wish very much to take my Viol de Gam[ba] and walk off to some sweet Village where I can paint Landskips and enjoy the fag End of Life in quietness and ease.’ As the great art historian Roger Fry, who praised Gainsborough above all other English eighteenth century artists, commented: ‘nothing in all Gainsborough’s art is more fascinating than his beginnings when, as a quite untaught boy at Sudbury, the passion for landscape came upon him. Landscape, indeed, was from beginning to end his true passion’.⁴

¹ R. Jones, 'The making of Gainsborough’s early landscapes', in M. Bills and R. Jones (eds), Early Gainsborough ‘From the obscurity of a country town’, Sudbury 2018, pp. 85–99.

² Quoted in Hayes 1982, p. 148.

³ Quoted in S. Sloman, Gainsborough’s landscapes. Themes and variations, exh. cat., Bath 2011, p. 54.

⁴ R. Fry, Reflections on British Painting, London 1934, p. 64.