British Drawings, Watercolours and Portrait Miniatures

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Lot 134
  • 134

Thomas Gainsborough R.A. 1727 - 1788

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Description

  • Thomas Gainsborough R.A.
  • Open landscape with travellers on a road

  • pencil with grey washes, heightened with white chalk, with varnish, on laid paper watermarked with a: Strasburg lily and pendent GR

  • 21.6 by 30.7 cm.; 8 1/2 by 12 1/8 in.

Provenance

with Agnew's, London;
Mint Museum of United States, Charlotte, North Carolina, (by 1987)

Exhibited

William Hayes Ackland Memorial Art Center, North Carolina, English Watercolours and Drawings 1700-1900, 21 September - 26 October, 1975, no. 29;
London, Agnew's, 127th Annual Exhibition, March 2000, no. 7

Catalogue Note

In this peaceful landscape, Gainsborough depicts three travellers on a wooded country road. Two figures are mounted on packhorses, while the third walks ahead. To the left; two sheep are seen resting and in the distance the form of a house is just visible.  

The present drawing dates from the 1780's. Hugh Belsey has suggested that Gainsborough's treatment of the 'broken outlines of the animals' is stylistically comparable to Wooded Landscape with Shepherd, Sheep, Horse and Cart, (see J. Hayes, The Landscape Painting of Thomas Gainsborough, vol. II 1982, no. 131a).