The Harvest Wagon

In the 1760s Gainsborough earned his living in Bath, the spa town where fashionable England came to take the waters and sit for portraits. Landscapes like this one he painted for his own pleasure, or on speculation, hoping a buyer would appear. He exhibited it in London in 1767, and it found no buyer. The figures are unusually large and carefully studied for one of his landscapes. Two of the young women on the cart are based on his daughters, Mary and Margaret, and the wooded country behind them is the land around Bath. The grey horse came from Walter Wiltshire, a Bath carrier whose wagons took Gainsborough's pictures up to London. When the painter left Bath for good in 1774, he gave Wiltshire this canvas as his thanks, and it stayed in the Wiltshire family until a grandson sold it in 1867.