Thomas Gainsborough

Thomas Gainsborough
(1727–1788)

Hilly Landscape with Cows on a Road

Black chalk, stumped, heightened with white chalk
11 x 14 9/16 inches (280 x 370 mm)

Purchased by Pierpont Morgan, 1910

III, 62
Item description: 

This brilliant chalk landscape is typical of Gainsborough's work in the early 1780s, the majority of which consists of rapid sketches of imaginary compositions done mostly as recreation. His style became increasingly sketchy, brilliant, and forceful. The Morgan's collection of twenty-five drawings by Gainsborough is of high quality, mostly coming from the Fairfax Murray collection that Pierpont Morgan bought en bloc in 1910.