Open Landscape with Country Wagon on an Undulating Track

This early landscape, painted when Gainsborough was around twenty years old, shows how fully he had absorbed the seventeenth-century Dutch technique and how he could bring everyday incident and drama into his paintings. Gainsborough has artfully created an interesting relationship between the foreground and midground through dramatic lighting. The sky is predominantly filled with dark, brooding storm clouds, but in places light breaks through to great effect. The composition has its central focus in a country wagon, a motif used by Gainsborough in many of his paintings, used here to lead the viewer through the undulating landscape as it moves through the midground to the distant horizon. The sophistication of Gainsborough’s landscape painting at such an early age is demonstrated clearly in this painting. Its success as a painting inspired two copies on panel, which were probably made by Julius Caesar Ibbetson (1759–1817).

On loan from the Schorr Collection