Once thought to date to the mid-1770s, when Gainsborough moved to London from Bath, the handling of this sheet suggests a date following the artist's visit to the Lake District in 1783. His early drawings respond to the English landscape, but this composition is an imagined conflation that demonstrates admiration for Claude Lorrain and Gaspard Dughet conveyed using black and white chalks on blue paper, a seventeenth-century technique. The appreciation for rough, irregular forms accords with the contemporary British aesthetic of the Picturesque.
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Medium:Black and white chalk with stumping on blue wove paper
Dimensions:Sheet: 10 9/16 x 13 1/8 in. (26.9 x 33.4 cm)
Classification:Drawings
Credit Line:Rogers Fund, 1907
Object Number:07.283.5
Inscription: in pen and brown ink at upper right of recto: "WE" (Lugt 2617), collector's mark of William Esdaile (1758–1837). in pen and black ink at lower left of verso: "1824 WE Nassau's sale N N 57x" (Esdaile's hand) in pen and black ink at center of verso: "Gainsboro" (Esdaile's hand)
George Richard S. Nassau (British), sold at the following; Nassau sale, held by Mr. Evans (British), March 25-27, 1824, part of lot 244, bought by Thane; William Esdaile (British); Esdaile sale, Christie's, London, March 20-21, 1838, lot 658, bought by White; Vendor: P. & D. Colnaghi & Co. Vendor: Through Roger Eliot Fry (British)
Hayes no. 672
Roger Eliot Fry "Drawings." The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin. 2, no. 12, (December 1907), p. 202.
Mary Woodall Gainsborough's Landscape Drawings. London, 1939, cat. no. 465, pp. 52, 142.
Walter Mehring European Drawings from the Collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art: A Portfolio of Collotype Reproductions [Vol. 1: Italian Drawings; Vol. 2: Flemish, Dutch, German, Spanish, French, and British drawings; Vol. 3: "New Series": Italian, Flemish, Dutch, German, Spanish, French, and British drawings]. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 3 vols., New York, 1942–44, no. 58, vol. II, ill.
Jacob Bean 100 European Drawings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: New York Graphic Society, 1964, cat. no. 98, ill.
"Drawings from the Roger Fry Purchase." Apollo. 82, (September 1965), p. 248, fig. 5.
John T. Hayes The Drawings of Thomas Gainsborough. Yale University Press, 2 vols., New Haven, 1971, cat. no. 672, p. 263, not reproduced.
Janet S. Byrne, Linda Boyer Gillies English Landscape Artists. Exh. brochure, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1971, cat. no. 13, p. 3.
Glorious Nature: British Landscape Painting 1750-1850. Exh. cat. Denver: Denver Art Museum. Katharine Baetjer, New York: Hudson Hill Press, 1993, cat. no. 13, pp. 112-113, ill.
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The Met's collection of drawings and prints—one of the most comprehensive and distinguished of its kind in the world—began with a gift of 670 works from Cornelius Vanderbilt, a Museum trustee, in 1880.
