The Cottage Door

Late in his career, Gainsborough made several important paintings on the theme of "The Cottage Door." Critics have interpreted this painting both as a testament to Gainsborough’s love of the country and as a document of social history. (It was viewed as a politely sanitized image of the rural poor, appealing to wealthy art patrons who had no interest in seeing how the poor really lived.) Sentimental depictions of poor children by the Spanish seventeenth-century painter Bartolomé Esteban Murillo were especially popular in Gainsborough’s day, and were a major influence on the English painter’s scenes of romping peasant children.

"The Cottage Door" combines a sweeping composition with loosely handled and thinly painted foliage, and bright narrative details such as brooms, pots, bundles of firewood, and animated figures. The painting is a visual equivalent to the Georgic mode of literature that was popular in Gainsborough’s day. Unlike pastoral literature, in which the inhabitants of the countryside live freely and without care, Georgic verse described a land where rest and diversions are the rewards for hard work. This point is illustrated here by the boy returning to his happy home carrying a large bundle of firewood, which the rural poor had to glean for their daily use.