Thomas Gainsborough R.A. 1727 - 1788

P. & D.Colnaghi & Co., London, from whom purchased by Sir Bruce Ingram (L.1405a)

London, P. & D. Colnaghi & Co., Watercolour Drawings of Three Centuries from the Collection of Sir Bruce and Lady Ingram, February - March 1956, no.19;
London, Arts Council of Great Britain, Gainsborough's Drawings, 1960-1961, p.6, no.16;
Nottingham, Gainsborough, 1962, no.42;
Winchester College, June 1963;
London, P. & D. Colnaghi & Co., English Drawings and Watercolours in memory of the late D.C.T. Baskett, July - August 1963, no.27;
London, Tate Gallery, Thomas Gainsborough, October 1980 - January 1981, no.16;
Washington, National Gallery of Art; Texas, Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum; Connecticut, New Haven, Yale Center for British Art, Gainsborough Drawings, November 1983 - March 1984, no.36

Turning the pages of illustrations to John Hayes' celebrated book on Gainsborough's Drawings (op.cit), anyone would surely pause at the works executed in and around Bath in the mid 1760s. These are some of Gainsborough's most beautiful and expressive pictures, including the upright watercolour of Wooded Landscape with Gypsy Encampment (Hayes no.276), now in The Mellon Collection, The Study of a Woman with a Rose (Hayes no.29), now in The British Museum, Wooded Landscape with Figures (Hayes no.308) and The Studies of Cats (Hayes no.874), now in the Rijksmuseum. His landscapes, of which the Ingram drawing offered here is one, take on a new luminescence, revealing a remarkable freedom of execution and evoking, in the most touching way, the impact of the rolling Somerset landscape around Bath.

In this charming work, Gainsborough depicts a mounted herdsman gently encouraging three cows down an incline towards a track. Beyond, the landscape falls away to a tree-lined valley and, crowning a further hilltop, there is an almost abstracted group of buildings. Through a complex composition, with its interplay of horizontals and diagonals, Gainsborough conveys both a sense of distance and of a soaring sky, with trees lilting their branches into the airy expanse. The figure is brilliantly seen in profile, caught in pale colours and set against a screen of shadowy trees. In this unstilted way the artist captures the enduring qualities of the English countryside and the way the changing patterns of light and shade alter one's perception of a scene from moment to moment.

In Hayes' text this drawing is picked out for special mention. 'The experience of the country around Bath was richly rewarding for Gainsborough's work. His landscapes were now more thickly wooded, with high banks and rocks and stone bridges over trees, and by about 1770 he was doing some in which luxuriant trees and dramatic rocks were the principal subjects... Distant villages are inserted as accents in this wooded background, or landscapes like the gouache in Major Ingram's collection, where a cluster of far off buildings is framed by foreground trees on the left and right, are a wholly English answer to Claude' (John Hayes, op.cit, p.49).