Thomas Gainsborough, R.A.

The picture appears to be in good condition with no extant damage or loss of paint. The canvas has been lined and there is visible retouching to the left and upper stretcher bar marks. The catalogue illustration is representative and there is a fine craquelure in the glazes lower left and lower centre. Examination under ultraviolet light reveals infilling to craquelure in the lower left and through the dark areas of the foreground. There are scattered flecks of retouching in the sky and areas of retouching in the sea. Three of the foreground figures have been added and fluoresce under UV. The right hand figure does not fluoresce however, and appears to be original. There are scattered flecks of minor retouching overall. The picture is held in a carved and gilded wooden frame. To speak to a specialist about this lot please contact Julian Gascoigne on +44 (0)207 293 5482.
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This fascinating, recently discovered and unfinished painting, by one of the greatest landscape artists Britain has ever produced, belongs to a very small group of such seascapes by Gainsborough. A drawing for the composition (Private Collection, UK),¹ though in mirror image, shares the same relationship between sea, land and sky, and another version of the composition, more fully worked up with fishermen washing their nets in the surf and figures setting off in a rowing boat from the shore, is in the National Gallery of Art, Washington. A preparatory drawing for the latter painting, again in mirror image, was with Sidney Sabin in London in 1972.² Only two other coastal scenes from this group are known, of which one is the picture entitled A Rocky Coastal Scene with Ruined Castle, sailing and rowing boats and fishermen dragging their nets in the Fairhaven Collection (National Trust, Anglesea Abbey),³ and the other is A coastal scene with sailing boats and girls buying fish by the shore in the Grosvenor Collection, London.⁴ Conservation of the latter in 2002 revealed that Gainsborough employed a painstaking technique, with many layers of very thin paint glazes, which he would then rub down to build up a translucent effect. This building up of layers was then heightened by the use of heavy impasto to create the spume of breaking waves, resulting in an amazingly realistic rendering of churning water. It is these initial, thin layers of glaze, rubbed back in areas and in the process of being re-built up in others, that can be seen in the present painting. Their very visibility, left exposed by the artist, is what makes this painting so fascinating, telling us so much about Gainsborough's working method, and revealing something of the artist's creative ingenuity.

Why the present painting was left unfinished, and how it relates to the Washington picture is unknown. Perhaps Gainsborough was requested to replicate that particular canvas, and the commission never completed. More likely however is the possibility that this was an earlier version of the design, which for some unknown reason the artist abandoned. Perhaps the labour intensive nature of the technique Gainsborough used meant the artist was forced to abandon the work to focus on more lucrative work, such as portraiture. What is certain however is that it includes the lyrical colours that appear in the other paintings from this group. The magenta in the upper left, the yellow ochres in the cliffs, and the blue of the sky and sea are all typical of the artist's work circa 1780-81.

We are grateful to Hugh Belsey for endorsing the attribution following first hand inspection, and for his assistance with the cataloguing of this lot.


1. See J. Hayes, The Drawings of Thomas Gainsborough, London 1970, text vol., no. 485, pp. 220-1.
2. See J. Hayes, The Paintings of Thomas Gainsborough, London 1982, vol. II, fig, 129a.
3. Hayes, op.cit, 1982, no. 126, pp. 485-7 (reproduced).
4. Hayes, ibid, no. 127, pp.487-9 (reproduced).