Mountain Landscape with Figures and Buildings

mid-to-late 1780s

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.

Artwork Details

Title: Mountain Landscape with Figures and Buildings
Artist: Thomas Gainsborough (British, Sudbury 1727–1788 London)
Date: mid-to-late 1780s
Medium: Black and white chalk with stumping, on blue-gray paper
Dimensions: Sheet: 10 5/16 × 15 15/16 in. (26.2 × 40.5 cm)
Classification: Drawings
Credit Line: Rogers Fund, 1907
Object Number: 07.283.6
Curatorial Department: Drawings and Prints

More Artwork

By Thomas Gainsborough

In the same medium

From the same time and place

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Landscape, Thomas Gainsborough British, Soft-ground etching on blue paper with touches of white chalk — Landscape
Thomas Gainsborough
18th–19th century

Wooded Landscape with Riders, Thomas Gainsborough British, Aquatint; second state of two — Wooded Landscape with Riders
Thomas Gainsborough
John & Josiah Boydell
August 1, 1797

Wooded Landscape with Country Cart, Cottage and Figures, Thomas Gainsborough British, Soft-ground etching; first state — Wooded Landscape with Country Cart, Cottage and Figures
Thomas Gainsborough
1784–86

Wooded Landscape with Herdsmen and Cows, Thomas Gainsborough British, Aquatint with soft-ground etching, printed in gray ink; third state of three — Wooded Landscape with Herdsmen and Cows
Thomas Gainsborough
John & Josiah Boydell
August 1, 1797

Wooded Landscape with Cows beside a Pool, Figures and Cottage, Thomas Gainsborough British, Soft-ground etching with aquatint, printed in gray ink — Wooded Landscape with Cows beside a Pool, Figures and Cottage
Thomas Gainsborough
1775–80

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