After his early career in London, Thomas Gainsborough moved back to his native Sudbury in 1748–49 and lived in Ipswich by 1752, where both of his daughters were born. Around 1759, he moved to Bath, where he prospered as a portrait painter. However, his passion was the creation of landscapes, and he wrote to his friend William Jackson, “I’m sick of Portraits and wish very much to take my Viol da Gam [viola da gamba] and walk off to some sweet Village where I can paint Landskips.”¹ He enjoyed the countryside surrounding Ipswich and then Bath, not returning to London until 1774, where he remained until his death in 1788.

Gainsborough’s obituarist, the Reverend Sir Henry Bate Dudley, wrote in 1788, “Nature was his teacher and the woods of Suffolk his academy; here he would pass in solitude his moments in making a sketch of an antiquated tree, a marshy brook, a few cattle, a sheep herd and his flock, or any other accidental object.”² Although Gainsborough made more elaborate landscape drawings indoors, tweaking the best elements to suit his composition, he also worked out-of-doors in sketchbooks and on small sheets of paper, considering them exercises.

Gainsborough never sold his drawings, keeping most of them or giving them to patrons or friends. This landscape drawing was owned by Joshua Kirby, the theorist, artist, and author of a treatise on perspective with whom Gainsborough was acquainted when living in Ipswich. They remained close friends, ultimately being buried near each other in the graveyard of Saint Anne’s Church at Kew. Kirby’s grandson the Reverend Kirby Trimmer recalled in the 1860s that Gainsborough “gave him [Joshua Kirby] his first drawings” and “above a hundred drawings in pencil and chalk, most of which I still have. . . . so that my family possessed the best collection of his early or Suffolk productions I have seen. There is a full-length self-portrait reclining on a bank, looking at a sketch on a stretching-board, for which he is engaged” (fig. 8.1).³ Gainsborough’s visits with Kirby no doubt influenced him to take inspiration outdoors, where he drew from nature, as well as from previous artists and his own imagination.

Gainsborough used graphite in his early drawings, a medium that he would almost abandon later in his career. He used the pencil to make long, sweeping strokes that indicate movement, and he varied the pressure of the instrument to indicate dark and light passages, suggesting depth. In this sketch, travelers appear toward the center of the composition along a path in the dense woods. The trees are composed of hatching and bent and looped lines, and he has smudged the graphite for further variation. According to John Hayes, “Although much sketchier in treatment, the crisp delineation of the branches, the handling of the foreground, the strongly rhythmical and elongated scallops of the foliage, and the cross-hatching in the sky are closely related to the landscape with peasants and donkey dated 1759 in the Witt Collection” (fig. 8.2).⁴

Gainsborough was known for depicting figures and animals in dialogue in his works, as seen in this sketch, where a figure rests on the ground close to two others, one positioned on top of a donkey, and the other next to it. The composition evokes the biblical scene of the Flight into Egypt, in which the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus ride on an ass accompanied by Joseph while fleeing Bethlehem. Yet, in the 1760s, Gainsborough dismissed ever using this subject, commenting that he preferred to “fill up” his compositions with “dirty little subjects of Coal horses & Jack asses and such figures.”⁵ Gainsborough did have a propensity for observing and then subsequently utilizing the rural poor in his compositions and was known for his charitable nature to the less privileged. Gainsborough would have been familiar with pictorial examples of travelers in fashionable dress with carriages, but in his works, he favored less elevated figures, such as beggars and peasant farmers returning from market, making them appear timeless.⁶ —Dena M. Woodall