This particularly finely drawn, early and previously unpublished drawing, depicting three figures seated by a track, is characteristic of Gainsborough’s work from the period around 1748. The combination of a small group of rustic figures, winding track and wooded landscape, inspired by seventeenth century Dutch landscapes, became a constant theme in Gainsborough’s work, realised in numerous drawn and paintings. The present drawing is a significant addition to Gainsborough’s oeuvre and appears to have been made at the same moment as well as sharing a common inspiration as a drawing in the Pierpoint Morgan Library, New York and may have been made in preparation for paintings.
Writing at the end of his life, Gainsborough observed of his early painting Cornard Wood, now in the National Gallery, London:
‘it is in some respects a little in the Schoolboy stile – but I do not reflect on this without a secret gratification; for – as an early instance how strong my inclination stood for LANDSKIP, this picture was actually painted at SUDBURY in the year 1748; it was begun before I left school; - and was the means of my Father’s sending me to London.’[1]
It has long be pointed out that there are inconsistencies in this statement – whilst Cornard Wood seems likely to have dated from 1746-8, Gainsborough left school in about 1740 – it underlines the importance of ‘LANDSKIP’ to the young artist, particularly the topography of his native town, Sudbury and its environs during the 1740s. Even whilst he worked in London, trying to establish a career as a metropolitan master, Gainsborough was thinking about the Suffolk landscape, producing drawings, paintings and designs for engravings which reflected this interest. The present sheet is therefore not necessarily drawn from life and may well have been executed in London. Instructively it is the same size and on the same paper as the sheet in the Pierpoint Morgan Library, showing that from an early stage Gainsborough took pleasure in repeating the same motifs in multiple studies. Another drawing recently identified in the Museum of New Zealand in Wellington shows a similar relationship between the figures and the landscape with a man leaning against a pile of logs with two women seated one on the logs and the other beside them. These drawings were incorporated into oil paintings at the same date, examples in the Yale Center of British Art, New Haven and the J.B. Speed Art Museum, Louisville, both of which show the same seated figures by a track within more expansive landscapes.
The present drawing also shows evidence of Gainsborough’s working method. In the bottom right-hand corner is a clump of burdock leaves, the distinctive profile of which appear in numerous drawings and paintings; a fine study of a burdock plant by Gainsborough from about 1750 is now in the British Museum. The group of figures are a variation on the rustic staffage Gainsborough introduces to many of his landscapes at this period; the man standing behind the seated woman, is shown wearing a distinctive, large flat-cap of which he was particularly fond. Whilst the trees are typically constructed, following Dutch precedents, Gainsborough used heavy pencil marks to indicate the trunks, with feathery hatching to build-up the foliage. It was a composition Gainsborough evidently felt would appeal to patrons, both as finished paintings and for a larger audience in the form of engravings.
The contention that the present drawing is not a finished work, but a sketched idea for a composition, is given strength by the existence of a fragmentary study of a tree on the verso of the sheet. Gainsborough’s ‘strong inclination for LANDSKIP’ throughout the 1740s means that a significant body of drawings survive, both taken from nature and imaginative evocations of nature, but few are as sensitively handled as the present sheet. In its confident, subtle line, bold combination of figures and landscape and rococo freedom, the present work is a hugely attractive addition to Gainsborough’s oeuvre.