Thomas Gainsborough, R.A.

The Reverend John Eagles, 1824;

H. de C. Harston, Fermain, Guernsey;

Anonymous sale ("The Property of a Gentleman"), London, Christie's, 24 April 1987, lot 44;

There acquired by Richard L. Feigen. 

ENGRAVED

F.C. Lewis, 1 March 1824 (in reverse). 

Until its appearance at auction in 1987, this intimate landscape by Thomas Gainsborough was known only through an engraving in reverse by F.C. Lewis, published 1 March 1824. At the time of the 1987 auction, Dr. John Hayes confirmed the attribution of the painting and compared it to Gainsborough's Landscape with Figures under a Tree, now at the Tate, London.¹ Hayes dates both the Feigen and the Tate landscapes to circa 1746-1747, when Gainsborough was a young artist in London, before he returned to his native Sudbury; the works, therefore, are amongst the artist's earliest explorations in landscape. This endeavor is reflective of the emerging market in London at the time for seventeenth-century Dutch artists such as Ruisdael, Hobbema, and Wijnants, though Gainsborough has cleverly embedded these Golden Age-inspired landscapes with a unique sense of the British countryside and its light. Throughout his life Gainsborough would spend time sketching en plein air in the British countryside and this early and charming oil study provides us with a glimpse of the young master's precocious talent at the onset of his long career. 

1. Now at the Tate, London, see https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/gainsborough-landscape-with-figures-under-a-tree-n01486