Mountain Landscape with Figures and Buildings

Thomas Gainsborough British

Not on view

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.

Mountain Landscape with Figures and Buildings, Thomas Gainsborough (British, Sudbury 1727–1788 London), Black and white chalk with stumping, on blue-gray paper

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Mountain Landscape with Figures and Buildings, Thomas Gainsborough (British, Sudbury 1727–1788 London), Black and white chalk with stumping, on blue-gray paper
Mountain Landscape with Figures and Buildings, Thomas Gainsborough (British, Sudbury 1727–1788 London), Black and white chalk with stumping, on blue-gray paper

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