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Wooded Landscape with Stream
Thomas Gainsborough (English, 1727-1788)
1750–59
- Medium
- Brush and black ink and gray wash, over graphite, on off-white laid paper, pieced along both vertical edges and laid down on cream laid paper
- Classification
- Drawing and Watercolor
- Dimensions
- 23.8 × 33.4 cm (9 3/8 × 13 3/16 in.)
- Culture
- England
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Prints and Drawings
- Credit line
- Gift of Dorothy Braude Edinburg to the Harry B. and Bessie K. Braude Memorial Collection
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
Though more in demand for his society portraits, Thomas Gainsborough expressed his passion for landscape subjects in hundreds of drawings executed throughout of his career. Early drawings made en plein air inspired later landscape sketches, such as this one, that combined directly observed natural elements with more idealized compositions found in the 17th-century French paintings admired by Gainsborough. Clusters of short, detached strokes convey the movement of the trees in the background while longer horizontal lines describe the placid surface of the water running through the scene.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
