Wooded Landscape with Cottage, Cowherd, and Cow

In a letter sent to the amateur artist and collector Thomas Harvey (1748-1819), Gainsborough remarked: "I feel such a fondness for my first imitations of little Dutch Landskips." The artist was referring to works such as this sheet, in which his fascination with seventeenth-century Dutch landscapists is evident. The hectic handling and brittle strokes of the graphite, as well as its horizontal, small-scale format and subject matter, seem to have been inspired by the works of celebrated northern artists such as Anthonie Waterloo (1609/10-1690) and Jacob van Ruisdael (1628/29-1682). -- Exhibition Label, from "Thomas Gainsborough: Experiments in Drawings."