Paysage romantique avec moutons près d'une source

Gainsborough made his living painting the faces of fashionable Britain, but landscape was what he loved, and this dark, brooding one from about 1783 followed a trip he had lately made to the Lake District. He rarely painted such scenes outdoors. Instead he built little tabletop models in his studio, using lumps of cork for rocks, moss and dried herbs for trees, even sprigs of broccoli, and lit them to paint from. The critic John Ruskin later praised the glowing distance here while grumbling that it looked nothing like real country. Gainsborough never gave the Royal Academy the diploma work expected of a founding member. After his death his daughter Margaret handed this picture over in his place.