Cottage Children (The Wood Gatherers)

By the 1780s Thomas Gainsborough was one of the most sought-after portrait painters in England, and privately he was tired of it. In his last years he turned to what the age called fancy pictures, sentimental scenes of ragged country children that fashionable collectors bought to hang in their comfortable drawing rooms. This is one of them, three children gathering firewood, painted in 1787. The boy seated with the bundle of kindling was drawn from life. He is thought to be Jack Hill, a local child whom the painter's daughter once considered taking into the family. The poverty is real enough as a subject, yet it has been softened and prettified for buyers who would never live it. Gainsborough finished this a year before he died, in 1788.