RÉSIDENCE # 06/08 (ENG)

Wooded Landscape with Old Peasant and Donkeys outside a Barn
Gainsborough’s House
Sudbury, UK
gainsborough.org

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Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788), Wooded Landscape with Old Peasant and Donkeys
outside a Barn, Ploughshare and Distant Church, Circa 1755 – 1757
Oil on canvas
Accepted in lieu of Inheritance Tax by H M Government
and allocated to Gainsborough’s House, 2015
2015.006 © Gainsborough’s House.

Text : Mahaut de La Motte-Broöns, Assistant Curator, Gainsborough’s House.

This Suffolk landscape was painted when Gainsborough was resident in Ipswich and has all the elements of the drawing books that the artist used when he was a boy: the familiar Dutch-inspired peasant life, burdock leaves in the foreground, the crumbling stable and fence. The toothless old peasant, here seen looking to the distant church tower is familiar in Gainsborough’s drawings, but it is unusual for him to make this the central character of a landscape. Its subject matter is elegiac and reflective in its theme of twilight; both the twilight of day and the twilight of life. The plough is at rest in the midground with tired donkeys in the foreground. The peasant looks toward the churchyard, which will soon become his permanent home. The landscape is typical of Gainsborough’s early technique in preparing his canvases. Rather than using a greyish ground as the majority of British artists of his time, he prefers using warm colours. Here the pink and orange ground shines through the painting and imbues the scene with a rosy hue of twilight.