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拍品專文
A copy of the drawing is in the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven (Mellon Collection).
This drawing, like others by Gainsborough, shows a track between banks of trees. The track runs towards the horizon where a town nestles at the foot of a mountain. As the eye journeys along the track it takes in the two figures on the left that appear to be reviewing the rest of their journey. Indeed, they provide a moment of calm in a landscape which is characterised by a frenzied movement of trees. The trees, a particular species known only to Gainsborough, sway in the wind and appear to be in animated conversation with one another. The sheet was drawn as a way of helping the artist to relax and the intellectual conundrum that he set himself was the endless search to find a pleasing balanced composition. Many drawings were made but few were chosen. This one, as we shall see, was developed into one of Gainsborough's greatest landscape canvases.
As a drawing, the Goyder sheet is amongst his best. John Hayes remarked on the similarity of its 'blurred outlines and soft, atmospheric effect', with the larger sheet which was formerly in the collection of Lord Clark of Saltwood (Mellon Bank, Pittsburgh). However, this particular drawing has another very important difference. In it Gainsborough adopted coloured chalk, a medium he used sparingly in his drawings. He must have used them to speed up the process of varying the tone without having to wait for the watercolour to dry.
In a famous letter advising his musician friend and amateur painter, William Jackson of Exeter, Gainsborough describes a laborious process he had developed for making coloured varnished drawings (The Letters of Thomas Gainsborough, edited by John Hayes, New Haven and London, 2000, pp. 100-11). The effort was worthwhile as the end product was generally considered a clever imitation of oil painting, and the results were often made to give away as gifts. Earlier in his career, when he was working in Bath in the 1760s, Gainsborough had used coloured pastels to make informal portraits, following the encouragement and example of William Hoare of Bath who had popularised the medium since the 1740s. In the present drawing Gainsborough tested the effect of the gold and brown and facilitated their application by sharpening the sticks of chalk at the top left-hand corner of the sheet.
Gainsborough uses the colour to emphasise the strong light of late afternoon shown in the centre of the drawing. Compositionally it conflicts with the directional pull of the track towards the horizon but this element links it to one of the artist's greatest landscape paintings, The Watering Place now in the National Gallery, London. When he saw the painting on exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1777, Horace Walpole described it as 'the finest Landscape ever painted in England'.
The connection between the Goyder drawing and the National Gallery's painting was first made by Dillian Gordon. There were perhaps other drawings which helped Gainsborough develop the composition, though none have yet been recognised and they may well have been destroyed. However, one of the artist's rare soft-ground etchings may record a lost study that developed the ideas rehearsed in the present drawing. In the print the composition is now centred around a pool with cattle surrounded by foliage which has taken on a Rubensian lushness and the etching makes greater play of the contrasts of light and shade. By the time Gainsborough's pictorial ideas were transferred to canvas a spring was added to provide the logic of the high colour of the bank, the cattle have goats as companions and a weary cowherd on horseback appears in the background.
The lasting effect of the painting is its dramatic lighting and arboraceous splendour; both were clearly in the artist's mind when he drew the present sheet.
We are grateful to Hugh Belsey for his help in preparing this catalogue entry.
This drawing, like others by Gainsborough, shows a track between banks of trees. The track runs towards the horizon where a town nestles at the foot of a mountain. As the eye journeys along the track it takes in the two figures on the left that appear to be reviewing the rest of their journey. Indeed, they provide a moment of calm in a landscape which is characterised by a frenzied movement of trees. The trees, a particular species known only to Gainsborough, sway in the wind and appear to be in animated conversation with one another. The sheet was drawn as a way of helping the artist to relax and the intellectual conundrum that he set himself was the endless search to find a pleasing balanced composition. Many drawings were made but few were chosen. This one, as we shall see, was developed into one of Gainsborough's greatest landscape canvases.
As a drawing, the Goyder sheet is amongst his best. John Hayes remarked on the similarity of its 'blurred outlines and soft, atmospheric effect', with the larger sheet which was formerly in the collection of Lord Clark of Saltwood (Mellon Bank, Pittsburgh). However, this particular drawing has another very important difference. In it Gainsborough adopted coloured chalk, a medium he used sparingly in his drawings. He must have used them to speed up the process of varying the tone without having to wait for the watercolour to dry.
In a famous letter advising his musician friend and amateur painter, William Jackson of Exeter, Gainsborough describes a laborious process he had developed for making coloured varnished drawings (The Letters of Thomas Gainsborough, edited by John Hayes, New Haven and London, 2000, pp. 100-11). The effort was worthwhile as the end product was generally considered a clever imitation of oil painting, and the results were often made to give away as gifts. Earlier in his career, when he was working in Bath in the 1760s, Gainsborough had used coloured pastels to make informal portraits, following the encouragement and example of William Hoare of Bath who had popularised the medium since the 1740s. In the present drawing Gainsborough tested the effect of the gold and brown and facilitated their application by sharpening the sticks of chalk at the top left-hand corner of the sheet.
Gainsborough uses the colour to emphasise the strong light of late afternoon shown in the centre of the drawing. Compositionally it conflicts with the directional pull of the track towards the horizon but this element links it to one of the artist's greatest landscape paintings, The Watering Place now in the National Gallery, London. When he saw the painting on exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1777, Horace Walpole described it as 'the finest Landscape ever painted in England'.
The connection between the Goyder drawing and the National Gallery's painting was first made by Dillian Gordon. There were perhaps other drawings which helped Gainsborough develop the composition, though none have yet been recognised and they may well have been destroyed. However, one of the artist's rare soft-ground etchings may record a lost study that developed the ideas rehearsed in the present drawing. In the print the composition is now centred around a pool with cattle surrounded by foliage which has taken on a Rubensian lushness and the etching makes greater play of the contrasts of light and shade. By the time Gainsborough's pictorial ideas were transferred to canvas a spring was added to provide the logic of the high colour of the bank, the cattle have goats as companions and a weary cowherd on horseback appears in the background.
The lasting effect of the painting is its dramatic lighting and arboraceous splendour; both were clearly in the artist's mind when he drew the present sheet.
We are grateful to Hugh Belsey for his help in preparing this catalogue entry.