The Watering Place

In 1768 Thomas Gainsborough saw this panel in London and painted a picture of his own in homage to it. English painters still treated landscape as a minor subject then, while in Flanders it had already become a genre in its own right. A young milkmaid with a brass pitcher on her head leads cattle off for milking, a youth sits astride a horse drinking in the stream, and a man with a pole tries to free a stubborn animal from the mud. Two black goats and two magpies are almost hidden in the growth. The flock grazing on the rocks near the water is a free repeat of the centre of another Rubens in this room, the shepherd with his flock in a wood, something he did nowhere else. X-rays show that the red-jacketed shepherd boy from that picture once stood here too, before he was painted out.