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Lot Essay
Many of Gainsborough’s drawings show tired figures and animals moving along country lanes. In this drawing a group of four heavy horses are plodding along a ridge followed by a bearded drover accompanied by his son and his dog. A shepherd with his flock is silhouetted against the horizon as the track bends rising up the hill. To the right of the composition a pair of leaning pollarded trees contrast with the vigorous saplings on the left and both provide animation to the composition and emphasize the exhaustion of the figures and animals. Gainsborough has used bodycolour for the two greys to give them extra impact and contrast them with the reddish brown tones of their surroundings. John Hayes dated the drawing to the later 1760s and, with more precision, Susan Sloman suggests a date of 1768–70.
The composition is experimental in the way that Gainsborough has made the drover and his son repoussoir figures by positioning them at the lower edge of the composition. All these details, however, reveal Gainsborough’s extraordinary economy of line, certainty of hand, and compositional acumen. The drawing is perfectly balanced with the spaces between the figures and the trees carefully judged.
Observing that the edges of the subject in this particular drawing are distorted, Susan Sloman argues that Gainsborough used a camera obscura to devise this image as the spherical aberration makes the trees on either side of the composition fall away. This convincing argument suggests that as well as using the reflection in a convex mirror Gainsborough may have been using a table-top model to arrange the elements in his composition. Gainsborough’s great rival, Joshua Reynolds, recorded in his assessment of the artist’s work that, ‘He even framed a kind of model of landskips, on his table; composed of broken stones, dried herbs, and pieces of looking glass, which he magnified and improved into rocks, trees, and water.’ Bolstering this supposition is the existence of a plaster model of a tired horse, head bowed to one side, that is identical to the reddish-brown horse on the right. The model once belonged to Gainsborough's fellow Suffolk artist, John Constable, and is presently on loan to Gainsborough’s House, in Sudbury.
We are grateful to Hugh Belsey for his help in preparing this catalogue entry.
The composition is experimental in the way that Gainsborough has made the drover and his son repoussoir figures by positioning them at the lower edge of the composition. All these details, however, reveal Gainsborough’s extraordinary economy of line, certainty of hand, and compositional acumen. The drawing is perfectly balanced with the spaces between the figures and the trees carefully judged.
Observing that the edges of the subject in this particular drawing are distorted, Susan Sloman argues that Gainsborough used a camera obscura to devise this image as the spherical aberration makes the trees on either side of the composition fall away. This convincing argument suggests that as well as using the reflection in a convex mirror Gainsborough may have been using a table-top model to arrange the elements in his composition. Gainsborough’s great rival, Joshua Reynolds, recorded in his assessment of the artist’s work that, ‘He even framed a kind of model of landskips, on his table; composed of broken stones, dried herbs, and pieces of looking glass, which he magnified and improved into rocks, trees, and water.’ Bolstering this supposition is the existence of a plaster model of a tired horse, head bowed to one side, that is identical to the reddish-brown horse on the right. The model once belonged to Gainsborough's fellow Suffolk artist, John Constable, and is presently on loan to Gainsborough’s House, in Sudbury.
We are grateful to Hugh Belsey for his help in preparing this catalogue entry.