Wooded landscape with herdsmen and cattle on a track

This drawing dates from about 1778, a few years after Gainsborough had moved from Bath to London. It took some time for him to establish himself in the capital and this gave him more time to draw. This work shows his focused interest in making a balanced composition using a limited number of rural elements. Cows, trees, rustic dwellings and figures appear in many of these pictorial arrangements. A herdsman with cattle moving down a slope was a particularly popular subject and the figure pointing in the bottom left of this drawing appears in several other works during the 1770s. It emphasises the movement in the design and directs the beholder’s eye to the kernel of the drawing’s subject. The tree in the top right hand corner of the composition and the distant trees are abstracted using a minimal number of considered strokes that encourages and manipulates the eye to concentrate on the central group of cows and figures.
Gainsborough uses a buff paper to contrast with the white chalk highlights he was to use to conclude the production of this drawing. With the rapid application of the grey wash he produced the composition and once the pigment had dried, Gainsborough returned to the sheet and made a few strokes of black chalk to consolidate the composition and make the shapes more focused and coherent. The tones of the rich dark bank silhouetting the five cows and the herdsman in the centre provide a striking contract with the tree to the right that uses the bare buff paper to give it form. Finally he added white chalk to give greater form to the composition and to give it more depth. It is only through intense observation and his assured technique that Gainsborough can achieve this extraordinarily fluent result.
This sheet is very similar in technique to the group of drawings that were formerly at Althorp, especially Hayes, op. cit., no. 460, pl. 363.
We are grateful to Hugh Belsey for his help in preparing this catalogue entry.