Exhibition | Young Gainsborough: Rediscovered Landscape Drawings
Thomas Gainsborough, Cornard Wood, near Sudbury, Suffolk, 1748, oil on canvas, 122 × 155 cm
(London: The National Gallery, NG925)
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Now on view at the National Gallery of Ireland:
Young Gainsborough: Rediscovered Landscape Drawings
York Art Gallery, 1 October 2021 — 13 February 2022
National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, 5 March — 12 June 2022
Nottingham Castle Museum, 2 July — 25 September 2022
Thomas Gainsborough, Study for Cornard Wood, ca. 1748 (Royal Collection Trust).
In 2017 an exciting discovery was made among the drawings in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle. The art historian Lindsay Stainton identified an album of 25 drawings—previously anonymous—as the work of the young Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788), one of the greatest British painters of the eighteenth century. Sketched in the countryside around his native Suffolk or conjured from his imagination, these beautiful drawings from the late 1740s shed new light on our understanding of the artist’s early career. The drawings will be presented alongside paintings and works on paper borrowed from collections across the UK and Ireland, including the National Gallery’s recently conserved masterpiece Cornard Wood (1748). Together, they will shed new light on Gainsborough’s early landscape practice and the techniques that made him one of the country’s most significant and influential artists. In addition to the drawings from the Royal Collection Trust, the exhibition is supported by generous loans from the National Gallery, London; the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; and Colchester and Ipswich Museums.
The wall labels from the York installation are available for download here»
New Book | Lives of Gainsborough
From The Getty:
Philip Thicknesse, William Jackson, and Sir Joshua Reynolds, with an introduction by Anthony Mould, Lives of Gainsborough (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2020), 144 pages, ISBN: 978-1606066645, $13.
A collection of contemporary texts about Thomas Gainsborough, a leading British portraitist and landscape painter in the eighteenth century.
Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) was a leading English landscape and portrait painter, draftsman, and printmaker who is now considered one of the most important British artists of the eighteenth century. This volume illuminates his life, career, personality, and passions through three diverse character sketches by Philip Thicknesse, an eccentric British adventurer, businessman, and writer; William Jackson, an artist and close friend to Gainsborough; and Sir Joshua Reynolds, an English portrait painter and the first president of the Royal Academy of Arts. An obituary published shortly after Gainsborough’s death lends insight into the artist’s impact. An introduction by Anthony Mould, a British art dealer and independent scholar, offers an overview of Gainsborough’s life and career.
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