Romantic Landscape with Sheep at a Spring

This painting may have been inspired by scenes that Gainsborough saw when he visited the West Country in 1782 and the Lake District in 1783. However, he actually painted many of his landscapes in his studio from models made of materials like cork, moss and broccoli (the large rocks here do look a lot like pieces of coal).

This work is more dramatic (and larger, at nearly two metres wide) than Gainsborough’s earlier landscape paintings. In the centre are two resting shepherds, while towering rocks loom over a bucolic scene of sheep grazing and a goat drinking from a spring on the left. The landscape is idealised and generalised rather than naturalistic and particular.

The Victorian writer and artist John Ruskin said of this painting: “Nothing can be more attractively luminous or aerial than the distance of the Gainsborough, nothing more bold or inventive than the forms of its crags and the diffusion of the broad distant light upon them, where a vulgar artist would have thrown them into dark contrast. [...] But it will be found that the light of the distance is brought out by a violent exaggeration of the gloom in the valley; that the forms of the green trees which bear the chief light are careless and ineffective; that the markings of the crags are equally hasty; and that no object in the foreground has realisation enough to enable the eye to rest upon it.”