BY DIRECTION OF THE TRUSTEES OF LORD CLARK'S SETTLEMENT TRUST
Thomas Gainsborough, R.A. (1727-1788)

Details
Thomas Gainsborough, R.A. (1727-1788)

A Peasant Family going to Market

black chalk and stump, grey and brown wash extensively heightened with Chinese white mixed with white chalk on brown paper
16 1/8 x 21in. (410 x 533mm.)
Provenance
Bequeathed by the artist to his widow
Margaret Gainsborough, the artist's daughter
Probably Henry Briggs, by descent; Christie's, 25 Feb. 1831, lot 107 (#2 to Johnson)
Walter, 4th Baron Northbourne; Sotheby's, 12 Dec. 1945, lot 45 (to Cooper)
With J. Leger & Son, February 1947
The Lord Clark, O.M.
Literature
The Illustrated London News, 22 September 1951, repr. p. 452
J. Hayes, The Drawings of Thomas Gainsborough, London 1970, pp. 50, 300 no. 826, repr. pl. 119
Exhibited
Arts Council tour to Bath, etc., Thomas Gainsborough, 1949 no. 23, lent by Sir Kenneth Clark
Arts Council, Three Centuries of British Water-Colours and Drawings, 1951, no. 73, repr. pl. Vb
London, Royal Academy, European Masters of the Eighteenth Century, 1954-5, no. 545

Lot Essay

As John Hayes has pointed out (loc. cit., p. 300), this is 'An unusually elaborate treatment (for a drawing) of the theme of travelling to and from market, with which Gainsborough was particularly preoccupied in the early 1770s'. He relates the foliage to other drawings of the early 1770s and the figures, in particular the girl, to those in the Landscape with Mounted Peasants going to Market sold by the artist to Henry Hoare in 1773 and now in Royal Holloway college, Egham (John Hayes, The Landscape Paintings of Thomas Gainsborough, 1982, II, p. 452 no. 107, repr.). The drawing is also characteristic of this period on account of its elaborate techique, at least in part that described by Gainsborough, under a charge of secrecy, in a letter to his friend William Jackson of 29 January 1773 in which he recommends stretching the paper on a frame 'like a drum', the use of skimmed milk and of white lead as a more permanent substitute for white chalk, and a final coat of varnish. The previous year, 1772, he had sent a group of drawings worked up in imitation of oil paintings for exhibition at the Royal Academy.

Gainsborough's depiction of idealised, idyllic country life, akin to that portrayed in James Thomson's The Seasons of 1726-8 and Oliver Goldsmith's The Deserted Village, 1770, was in part derived from the landscapes by Rubens that he saw while at Bath, but also reflected a more personal involvement. Uvedale Price, who went on 'frequent excursions with him into the country' from Bath said that Gainsborough was a man 'of a lively and playful imagination, yet at times severe and sarcastic: but when we came to cottage or village scenes, to groups of children, or to any objects of that kind which struck his fancy, I have often remarked in his countenance an expression of particular gentleness and complacency'. As Gainsborough's friend the Reverend Sir Henry Bate-Dudley wrote some ten years later of another work, 'The peasants are that lovely class, which his creative mind has formed to ornament his works; they exhibit grace, beauty and elegance unadorned but by the Painter's hand'. At the same time, however, the figures are given such weight as to remind the cultivated spectator of the day of a Flight into Egypt. This drawing is, therefore, a particularly concentrated example of the mixed sentiments and allusions that marked the new appreciation of nature in 18th century England.

Two copies of this drawing are known, one in the Fogg Museum, the other, in oils and attributed to the artist's nephew Gainsborough Dupont, in the Tate Gallery (no. NO1488)

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