Thomas Gainsborough ra 1727–1788
NG 925 
Cornard Wood, near Sudbury, Suffolk

Judy Egerton, 2000

Extracted from:
Judy Egerton, The British Paintings (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2000).

1748

Oil on canvas, 122 × 155 cm (48 × 61 in.)

Provenance

According to Gainsborough himself, the picture was painted in 1748 and sold soon after, passing through the hands of ‘twenty dealers’ (he himself once buying it back for 19 guineas), until sold by Richard Morrison, Greenwood’s, 8 March 1788 (78) for 75 guineas, bt Alderman John Boydell (d.1804); his nephew, Josiah Boydell, by 1808 reported as hoping to sell the picture for 150 guineas;¹ purchased (? from him) by David Pike Watts,² and in his collection by 1814 (when exhibited BI ), then by descent to his daughter Mary, m. 1811 Jesse Russell (later Watts‐Russell), Ilam Hall, Staffordshire;³ Jesse Watts‐Russell, executors’ sale, Christie’s 3 July 1875 (32, as ‘A wood scene, with figures; a view near the village of Cornard in Suffolk’), 1150 guineas, bt Sir Frederic Burton, Director of the National Gallery, out of the Lewis Fund for the National Gallery 1875.

Exhibited (with varying titles)⁴

London, Pall Mall, Boydell Shakespeare Gallery, 1790 , with Prestel’s engraving of the subject, as noted below; BI 1814 (16); BI 1843 (176); Manchester 1857 (Saloon D, 95); NG , Cleaned Pictures, 1947 (82); The Hague, Mauritshuis, The Shock of Recognition, 1970–1, and Tate Gallery 1971 (30, repr.); Tate Gallery 1973–4 (51, repr. p.40); Bury St Edmunds, Manor House Museum, Suffolk Landscapes, 1993 (no cat.); London (NG), Norwich and Newcastle 1997 (24).

At the Tate Gallery 1960-1; 1963-4 .

Literature

Morning Herald, 12 March 1788 [p. 3, col. a], and Gainsborough’s letter of 11 March 1788 published in a later issue (? 1788), now known only from a cutting in the V&A Library (‘Press Cuttings from English Newspapers on Matters of Artistic Interest 1686–1835’, vol. 2, p. 532); Fulcher 1856, pp. 10, 197; Whitley 1915, pp. 296–302, 333–4 (and see Whitley Papers, MSS and typescript, BM, P&D , ‘Gainsborough scrapbook’ [2], pp. 26–7, 80); Mary Woodall, ‘A Note on Gainsborough and Ruisdael’, Burlington Magazine, LXVI, 1935, pp. 40–5; Woodall 1939, pp. 12, 13, 24, 29; Waterhouse 1953, pp. 173–4, plate 151; Davies 1959, pp. 36–7; Hayes 1975, p. 204; Potterton 1976, p. 8; Hayes 1982, I, pp. 40–1, 51, 64, 65–7, 76; II, cat. no. 17, pp. 342–3, repr. p. 343, with detail plate 75; E. John Walford, Jacob van Ruisdael, New Haven and London 1991, p. 187.

Engraved

by Mary Catherine Prestel, in etching and aquatint, and in reverse, lettered Gainsborough's Forest / From the Original Picture in the collection of Alderman Boydell/Published Jan 1st 1790 by J. & J. Boydell⁵ Cheapside & at the Shakspeare Gallery Pall Mall London; displayed (and orders taken for other impressions) with the painting at Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery 1790.

Copies

Hayes 1982, II, p. 344, notes a slightly reduced copy sold Sotheby’s 22 July 1959 (64), and a small variant copy in a private collection, USA.

Technical Notes

Cleaned in 1945. The condition is good, with no significant loss or damage, but the paint of the foliage is thin and markedly affected by drying cracks.

The present stretcher does not correspond exactly with the original shape. At the top edge the paint of the sky continues over the turnover for the whole depth of the stretcher (2.5 cm) and the canvas has been cut, though there is no indication of how much is missing. At the bottom edge, about 1 cm of paint is turned over the stretcher, and the canvas appears not to be cut. At each side, a width of about 2.5 cm is now on the surface, although originally turned over, and the unpainted edges of the canvas survive.

The strip of painted canvas turned over the top edge of the stretcher is pale blue, though the sky itself is grey. Cross‐section examination shows that the sky, apart from the clouds, is a weak tint of Prussian blue and lead white, and that the Prussian blue has faded except where it has been protected from light by foliage painted over it or by being turned over the stretcher.

The greyest clouds contain no blue pigment and consist of lead white mixed with charcoal. The bluish tinge results from the cool tones of charcoal when mixed with white. The deepest greens of the foliage are mixtures based on Prussian blue combined with earth pigments, bone black and yellow lake, which are common in eighteenth‐century landscape painting and in Gainsborough in particular.

Discussion

Cornard Wood is on the outskirts of the village of Great Cornard, two miles from Sudbury, Gainsborough’s birthplace. Gainsborough’s viewpoint has been established by Hugh Belsey,⁶ Curator of Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury, who observes that the view is taken from Abbas Hall,⁷ on a hillside above Great Cornard, looking south and slightly west to the village of Great Henny.⁸ The church of St Mary’s, Great Henny, can be seen in the background, the eye being led to it by the path winding through the wood; but as Belsey notes, Gainsborough has somewhat telescoped the distance between his viewpoint and Great Henny, and has allowed himself some licence in depicting its church tower.⁹

This scene is of common land, not private property. Outside the village, the wood gives the villagers common (and ancient) rights to gather wood, graze donkeys and horses, dig marl¹⁰ for manure and sand for building materials, take the path to Great Henny or just take the air; under thin sunlight, figures and animals in (chiefly) the left half of the picture do [page 73][page 74]these various things. Its right half, empty of figures, is shaded, and still. Branches of trees are clearly reflected in two adjoining ponds; such ponds, fed by springs, are still to be found in this part of Suffolk.

Such scenery, and such activities, must have been familiar to Gainsborough since childhood. He told Philip Thicknesse, his friend, early patron and anecdotalist, that even before he learnt to draw, ‘there was not a Picturesque clump of Trees, no, nor hedge row, stone, or post, at the corner of the Lanes, that he had not so perfectly in his mind’s eye, that had he known he could use a pencil, he could have perfectly delineated’.¹¹ He began teaching himself to draw and paint by studying and copying the landscapes of Dutch artists, particularly Jacob van Ruisdael; his close copy in black chalk of Ruisdael’s Woodland Ford with Figures and Cattle (‘La Forêt’) is frequently reproduced.¹²

The taste for Dutch landscape was one Gainsborough shared with many others before him and in his own time. In English Taste in Landscape in the Seventeenth Century¹³ (a rich yet strangely neglected source), H. and M. Ogden trace a long line of Dutch artists working in England between 1660 and 1700. Andrew Moore’s valuable study of Dutch and Flemish paintings in East Anglian collections¹⁴ shows the increasing popularity of Dutch landscapes with English collectors during the eighteenth century. Dealers stocked Dutch pictures since they had a wide appeal to those who preferred the recognisable reality rather than the unrealisable, Claudian ideal. Growing up in Sudbury, Gainsborough could have seen Dutch paintings in East Anglian collections, and probably knew others in the form of engravings. In the work of Ruisdael and Cuyp, Pynacker and Saftleven,¹⁵ he could have recognised ‘a common, native landscape’ (Andrew Moore’s phrase)¹⁶ to which he could respond, which he could readily adapt, and which was also marketable. Gainsborough appears to have had contacts with dealers from the 1740s, particularly with Panton Betew, a Suffolk‐born dealer in London, who handled several of his early Suffolk landscapes and commissioned engravings of them.¹⁷ In 1748, when Cornard Wood was (in Gainsborough’s own phrase) ‘first delivered by me to go in search of those who had taste enough to admire it’, it is likely that he took it to Panton Betew, who bought it, outright or on commission, and placed it for sale in his shop in Old Compton Street, Soho.

Hayes cites two pictures listed in a sale catalogue of 1766 as evidence that Gainsborough did some hack work for dealers, ‘repairing a Dutch landscape, and putting figures into a landscape by Wijnants’; but it should be noted that the latter name in fact appears in the sale catalogue as ‘Wynants’, and that Adrienne Corri has traced a Francis Wynants working in Suffolk with whom Gainsborough might have collaborated, rather than undertaking the more difficult exercise of superimposing figures on a much earlier artist’s work.¹⁸ Whether on this occasion he ‘put figures’ into a landscape painted by the Wijnants who died in 1684 or collaborated with a Wynants of his own day remains unclear; but in either case, too much should not be made of this.¹⁹ Many artists, especially when young and needy, were willing to oblige dealers with a bit of restoration; after all, they had brushes and paints to hand, and ‘obliging’ might help if their own works were to be accepted for sale.

Forty years after painting the picture we now know as Cornard Wood, Gainsborough wrote that it was ‘actually painted at Sudbury, in the year 1748’. He states this in a letter dated 11 March 1788, written from his home in Pall Mall to his friend Henry Bate Dudley, who published it in the Morning Herald. Gainsborough’s letter is reproduced here in full (fig. 1), for quite apart from being a characteristic example of his letter‐writing style, it is an important document for Cornard Wood. Though this letter recalls a picture painted forty years earlier and, like all Gainsborough’s letters, is written impulsively, there is no good reason to disbelieve anything in the artist’s own statements in it.

The letter was prompted by the fact that three days earlier, Cornard Wood had unexpectedly resurfaced in Greenwood’s saleroom, where it was purchased by the well‐known collector and print‐publisher Alderman John Boydell. As a good newspaper man, Bate Dudley judged that the reappearance of an [page [75]]early ‘large Landscip’ by an artist known in the 1780s chiefly as a fashionable portraitist would make an interesting news item; he therefore asked Gainsborough for information about it. Gainsborough’s response was the letter reproduced here; but evidently thinking that Gainsborough’s letter‐writing style was too whimsical for his readers, Bate Dudley published his own genteel (and misleading) paraphrase of it the next day,²⁰ publishing the letter itself only after Gainsborough’s death.

Gainsborough thinks of the picture as ‘in some respects a little in the schoolboy stile’, and as ‘an early instance of how strong my inclination stood for LANDSKIP’. He then states perfectly clearly that ‘this picture was actually painted at SUDBURY, in the year 1748’, adding that ‘it was begun before I left school; – and was the means of my Father’s sending me to London’. Gainsborough’s recall of events of 1748 is likely to have remained particularly clear: that was the year of his father’s death, and his own return from London to live and work in Sudbury.²¹ By the spring of 1788, when he was asked to recollect Cornard Wood, he owned to being in ‘bodily pain’ (he died of cancer in August);²² but other letters show a mind still keen and work still progressing. Hayes however believes that ‘the date of 1748 is open to question on stylistic grounds, and it is conceivable that after forty years, Gainsborough’s memory played him false.’²³ Hayes prefers to date Cornard Wood to ‘ c. 1746–7’, and later writers have fallen into line behind him.

Of nearly 200 landscapes painted over the years by Gainsborough, only one is actually dated – the so‐called Rest by the Way now in Philadelphia, dated 1747.²⁴ Hayes’s dating of ‘ c. 1746–7’ orders Cornard Wood into a position four works earlier than the Philadelphia picture, largely, it seems, because he considers that Cornard Wood ‘suffers from the inclusion of too many unrelated motifs’²⁵ and demonstrates that ‘subject‐matter of any clearly defined or meaningful description … was not [yet] within Gainsborough’s grasp’. But there is a subject in Cornard Wood, perhaps more obvious to economic historians than to art historians: this is the common just outside Sudbury, used by the villagers for small gainful activities – much as similar figures abound in Jan van der Heyden’s Cross Roads in a Wood, a painting of about 1675 whose likely influence upon Gainsborough, noted by Bachrach in 1971,²⁶ is ignored by Hayes and his followers.

Admittedly, the common seems over‐crowded; but it is crowded not by ‘unrelated motifs’ but by people with distinct purposes. A year or two later, Gainsborough amply demonstrated his ability to handle clearly defined subject matter, with a landscape recently identified by the Suffolk historian Norman Scarfe as Holywells Park, Ipswich (fig. 3), in which the ponds are man‐made, constructed to supply Cobbold’s Brewery with pure water from Holywells’ natural springs.²⁷ Cornard Wood is more ‘picturesque’ (or less realistic) than Holywells Park; but at its core it retains a sense of a real place, however unreally crowded with picturesque staffage.

Using the evidence of exhibition and saleroom catalogues, newspaper reviews, engravings and a few surviving receipts, Hayes has constructed a valuable list of ‘Datable Landscapes’;²⁸ but such supporting evidence is sparse for the early landscapes. Here his chronological order must be surmised ‘on stylistic grounds’, which inevitably produces chain‐dating,²⁹ and does not admit the possibility that a work might hang [page 76]about in an artist’s room, picked up now and then, reviewed and either discarded or finally pulled together, Hayes acknowledges that ‘very few of the landscapes are precisely datable, especially in the early and middle years of Gainsborough’s career’.³⁰ Gainsborough himself has stated that Cornard Wood was ‘actually painted … in the year 1748’, which would place it a year later than the Philadelphia picture; to this compiler, that seems perfectly credible. In the absence of any reason to disbelieve him – other than the inevitably subjective perception of ‘stylistic grounds’ – this compiler prefers to respect Gainsborough’s own date of 1748.

Gainsborough’s recollection that Cornard Wood ‘was begun before I left school’ is less specific (or more ambiguous), than the statement later in his letter that ‘this picture was actually painted … in the year 1748’. It has sometimes been taken to mean that Gainsborough began the painting (or possibly even completed it) at the age of twelve or thirteen, in 1740, the year in which he probably left home for London, to study drawing in the St Martin’s Lane Academy.³¹ Even a small knowledge of Gainsborough’s habitually airy, allusive and wholly undocumentary letter‐writing style³² suggests that his phrase ‘begun before I left school’ does not literally mean ‘before I left Sudbury Grammar School’,³³ but rather while he was still learning his art, drawing studies from nature on scraps of paper which (as Thicknesse recalled) he called ‘his Riding school’, and painting (in his own phrase) ‘a little in the schoolboy stile’. Hayes’s interpretation of Gainsborough’s wording seems reasonable enough; ‘the most obvious explanation is that he had made drawings and sketches of the scene while he was still a schoolboy and only took them up again several years later’;³⁴ but it should be noted that he makes rather too large a claim for his evidence in saying that ‘X‐ray photographs show that he did not deviate one iota from his composition once he had started work upon the canvas; the inescapable conclusion is that every detail had been carefully thought out beforehand – one only regrets the many lost drawings.’³⁵ The X‐ray photographs in question, taken by the National Gallery at Dr Hayes’s request, are of the middle section of the picture only, and are not easy to interpret, since they chiefly show the picture’s ground rather than the paint.³⁶

Gainsborough himself remarks in his letter of 1788 that ‘though there is very little idea of composition in the picture, the touch and closeness to nature in the study of the parts and minutiae, are equal to any of my latter productions’. This claim is abundantly justified, as a detail shows (fig. 2). Some pride in and affection for this early work are evident in his letter; but he hopes not to sound ‘vain or ridiculous’ in expressing them, and adds ‘do not look on the Landskip as one of my riper performances’. Writing about Cornard Wood perhaps prompted him (two months later, in a letter to his [page 77]Norfolk friend Thomas Harvey) to recall ‘my first imitations of little Dutch landscapes’.³⁷

Attention has been drawn to the ‘grey skies’ in Cornard Wood;³⁸ but they were not always so grey. As observed in the Technical Notes, the sky is painted with a weak tint of Prussian blue which has faded, except where the canvas was turned over at the top edge. While the sky itself now appears to be grey, with greyer clouds, it must once have been as blue as the skies in the small and probably slightly earlier canvas called Landscape with a Peasant on a Path,³⁹ and in the Wooded Landscape with Herdsman⁴⁰ (fig. 4) which Hayes dates ‘ c. 1746–8’, but which appears to this compiler to be close in date (and place) to Cornard Wood, and thus likely also to have been painted in 1748.

Cornard Wood belonged for some years to John Constable’s uncle, David Pike Watts; it hung in his house in Portland Place, where Constable could often have seen it. When his uncle lent the picture to the British Institution in 1814, it was catalogued as ‘A woody scene, in his early manner’; it may have been Constable who recognised the scene as near Cornard, and helped to evolve the title under which it descended to his cousins. Constable was born within ten miles of Gainsborough’s birthplace.⁴¹ When, as a young man of 23, he first called on Joseph Farington RA (on 25 February 1799), the conversation turned to Gainsborough’s work. Farington records that ‘Mr J. Constable of Ipswich calld … thinks first pictures of Gainsborough his best, latter so wide of nature.’⁴² Painting near Woodbridge in Suffolk the following summer, Constable wrote to J.T. Smith: ‘tis a most delightfull country for a landscape painter, I fancy I see Gainsborough in every hedge and hollow tree.’⁴³ At this stage in Constable’s development, what he looked for and found in Gainsborough’s early landscapes was truth to nature. By the time he gave his lectures on landscape painting in 1836, he could respond to something less particular and more elusive in Gainsborough’s pictures: ‘On looking at them, we find tears in our eyes, and know not what brings them.’⁴⁴ Constable discussed Ruisdael in these lectures, bringing into the lecture hall a copy he had himself recently made of a Ruisdael winter scene in order to demonstrate ‘that Ruysdael understood what he was painting’.⁴⁵

The influence of Dutch artists passed on to the next generation of East Anglian landscape painters. It is evident, for instance, in the Landscape: A View through Trees painted by James Stark in the 1820s, and now in the Castle Museum, Norwich.⁴⁶ In a letter to Stark of 1816, his master John Crome gave the general advice that ‘Trifles in Nature must be overlooked that we may have our feelings raised by seeing the whole picture at a glance, not knowing how or why we are so charmed.’⁴⁷ Gainsborough was to be praised by [page 78]Théophile Thoré (later better known as Thoré‐Bürger) for just such wisdom, which Thoré discerned in a group of his later landscapes exhibited in the Manchester Art Treasures exhibition of 1857. Of these Thoré wrote: ‘Il ébauchait tout d’un trait son tableau et le poussait harmonieusement de haut en bas, sans isoler son attention sur de petits fragments, sans s’obstiner aux détails; car il cherchait l’effet général, et il le trouvait presque toujours … d’un seul coup d’oeil.’⁴⁸ He went so far as to say that the Louvre should acquire a landscape by Gainsborough even if it meant paying for it (‘honnêtement et par le simple vertu des livres sterling’).⁴⁹ When Gainsborough painted Cornard Wood, at the age of twenty, he put too many ‘petits fragments’ in it, and charming as these individually are, they distract us from ‘seeing the whole picture at a glance’ (in Crome’s phrase), ‘d’un seul coup d’oeil’ (in Thoré’s). Gainsborough’s own awareness of this no doubt explains why, forty years later, he pronounced his picture to be ‘a little in the schoolboy stile’. Undoubtedly it is unsophisticated in composition; as certainly, there is a note of reverie about it which sets it wholly apart from the realism of the ‘little Dutch landscapes’ he had studied in his youth.

Perhaps unexpectedly, the last word might go to Roger Fry. In 1934, discussing the weaknesses – but still more the strengths – of Cornard Wood, aware of the artist’s models yet still more aware of his individuality, he writes:Cornard Wood… is in effect a transposition of a Dutch landscape into an English mood, and with a freshness and delicacy of feeling which is entirely personal to Gainsborough; and with that, a franker acceptance of the colour of nature than Hobbema or Ruysdael allowed. Beside them, no doubt it would look a little fragile and over subtle; it lacks their forcible construction and vigorous relief. But though it is not overemphasised, the relief and the spatial construction are none the less felt, and perhaps that very delicacy and understatement of contrast conduces to the dreamy tranquillity of its mood.⁵⁰

Notes