Paisaje boscoso con un pastor sentado

Thomas Gainsborough was about 21 when he painted this small wooded scene in 1748, back home in Suffolk and years before portraits of fashionable sitters made him rich. He had taught himself landscape largely by studying Dutch pictures, the woods and skies of painters like Ruisdael and Wynants, which he could find in East Anglian collections and through prints. You can see that schooling here in the feathery trees and the low, damp light, and in the herdsman resting among his cattle rather than any grand incident. Gainsborough would always say landscape was what he truly loved, even as portrait commissions took over his time. The picture stayed local, and now hangs in the house in Sudbury where he was born.