Thomas Gainsborough left Bath for a return to London in 1774, continuing to compulsively draw his favorite “landskips.”¹ He had abandoned the strict use of a pencil for chalks, ink, and watercolor washes, sometimes using bits of sponge tied to sticks to add shadows and a lump of white chalk held by tea tongs as a makeshift porte-crayon to add highlights. Gainsborough’s friend William Jackson commented, “If I were to rest his reputation upon one point, it should be on his drawings . . . the subject, which is scarce enough for a picture, is sufficient for a drawing, and the hasty loose handling . . . is rich in a transparent wash of bistre and Indian ink.”² In addition to sketching outdoors in nature, Gainsborough's creative process included arranging model landscapes in his studio from which to draw, using dried herbs, roots, mosses, stones, cork, and coal, as well as looking glasses for water reflections and broccoli for trees.³ His process was considered “rather capricious, truly deserving the epithet bestowed upon them by a witty lady, who called them moppings . . . his vast number of bold, free sketches of landscape and cattle, all of which have a most captivating effect to the eye of an artist, or connoisseur of real taste.”⁴

This fluid wash drawing, made at the summit of his artistic career, is not strictly topographical, but rather depicts a utopia of peace and tranquility. In it, Gainsborough employs a restricted vocabulary of visual motifs (figures, cattle, a pond, and trees), reducing them almost to shapes and lines. His added washes suggest rather than demarcate form, and the pastoral scene has a sense of poeticism. The commentary by Edward Edwards in his 1808 Anecdotes of Painters on Gainsborough’s late landscape drawings rings true: “Bold effect, great breadth of form, with little variety of parts, united by a judicious management of light and shade, combine to produce a certain degree of solemnity. This solemnity, though striking, is not easily accounted for, when the simplicity of materials is considered, which seldom represent more than a stony bank, with a few trees, a pond, and some distant hills.”⁵

The evocative and idealized nature of this drawing is somewhat inspired by the landscapes of the French artist, born in Rome, Gaspard Dughet, whose compositions would have been familiar to Gainsborough and his circle through Dughet’s paintings and the prints made after them.⁶ Grand tourists brought back to England many works by the European practitioners of landscape, including Dughet, Claude Lorrain, Nicolas Poussin, and Salvator Rosa.⁷ British artists, like Gainsborough, emulated them in their own approach, imbued with a naturalism and humbleness also seen in works by Dutch eighteenth-century artists working in England. This drawing can be compared to others that similarly feature loose, crenate foliage, cows with angular features, and figures near a pond, such as Wooded Landscape with Cattle at a Watering Place, once in the Colonel P.L.M. Wright Collection, London, Wooded Landscape with Cows, at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, or Wooded Landscape with Herdsman, Cows, and Sheep Drinking from a Pond at the Courtauld.⁸

The drawing is well-balanced and also includes a signature motif of Gainsborough, in which he contrasts one darkened animal overlapping a lighter one, as seen in the cows at center.⁹ Gainsborough often explored the theme of repose. Here, human figures, a sheep, and cows all rest under the shady, sheltering trees and along the water’s edge, presumably after laboring. The composition fully expresses Gainsborough’s belief in a compassionate, harmonious rapport between humankind and nature. —Dena M. Woodall