Haymaker and Sleeping Girl

When Gainsborough died in 1788, his nephew and apprentice Gainsborough Dupont was offered any picture in the studio, and this is the one he chose. The painter had taken pains over it. A preparatory drawing for the composition survives. A young haymaker, hay still in his hat and his rake beside him, has stopped work at a fence, and on the other side a girl lies asleep. Her pale skin and refined clothes tell you she is no country girl, and the Museum of Fine Arts reads the fence as only one of the barriers between them, the other being class. A small terrier beside her looks about to bark and break the spell. The picture has also been known by another name, The Mushroom Girl. Dupont kept it until his own death in 1797, and when his pictures were sold at Christie's in London that April, this one failed to find a buyer and was bought in.