Mountain Landscape with a Castle and a Boatman

Thomas Gainsborough

mid-to-late 1780s · Black and white chalk with stumping on blue wove paper · Drawings and Prints

Once thought to date to the mid-1770s, when Gainsborough moved to London from Bath, the handling of this sheet suggests a date following the artist's visit to the Lake District in 1783. His early drawings respond to the English landscape, but this composition is an imagined conflation that demonstrates admiration for Claude Lorrain and Gaspard Dughet conveyed using black and white chalks on blue paper, a seventeenth-century technique. The appreciation for rough, irregular forms accords with the contemporary British aesthetic of the Picturesque.

Artist

Thomas Gainsborough

Date

mid-to-late 1780s

Medium

Black and white chalk with stumping on blue wove paper

Department

Drawings and Prints

Credit line

Rogers Fund, 1907