2-722-096 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

A Herdsman with Three Cows by an Upland Pool, mid 1780s. Although he was one of the most celebrated society portraitists of his day, landscape painting was Gainsborough’s love and lifelong pleasure. Here, delicate layers of watercolour, ink, oil paint, and chalk result in a jewel-like work on paper. The composition combines the rural scene of a herdsman and three cows with an imagined, majestic mountain view, mingling the pastoral with the sublime. The sheet was among a group of 14 landscape drawings that Gainsborough selected as a gift for a close friend.