L'Abreuvoir

Gainsborough made his living painting portraits of fashionable people, but landscape was what he loved, and he grumbled about the sitters who paid the bills. In 1777 he sent six works to the Royal Academy in London, and alongside two grand portraits hung this large canvas, listed in the catalogue only as 'A large landscape'. He had been studying Rubens, and it shows in the towering bank of blue-green trees and the warm evening light settling over cattle at a pool. Nothing in it is a real place. It is an invented, ideal English countryside at the close of day, unhurried and still. Horace Walpole, the writer and collector, saw it and called it, in the style of Rubens, the finest landscape ever painted in England.