Public collection via the Cleveland Museum of Art
AT-00011046A Herdsman with Three Cows by an Upland Pool
About the Artwork
Although he was one of the most celebrated society portraitists of his day, landscape painting was Thomas Gainsborough’s love and lifelong pleasure. Here, delicate layers of watercolor, ink, oil paint, and chalk result in a jewel-like work on paper. The composition combines the rural scene of a herdsman and three cows with an imagined, majestic mountain view, mingling the pastoral with the sublime. The sheet was among a group of 14 landscape drawings that Gainsborough selected as a gift for a close friend.
Provenance
?-?: Goodenough Earle, Barton Grange, Somerset, England ?-1794: Francis Miller Newton, by descent to Josepha Sophia Newton 1848-?: Josepha Sophia Newton ?-1913: Francis Wheat Newton 1913-1914: (Agnew's, London) 1914: (M. Knoedler & Co., New York, NY) ?-?: George D. Widener [1889-1971], Philadelphia ?-?: Private collection, by descent to private collection, United States ?-1989: Private collection, United States after 1989-2005: David Lee, UK, by descent to private collection 2005: Private collection 2005-2006: (Lowell Libson, London, sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH) 2006-: Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
Exhibition history
British Drawings from the Cleveland Museum of Art . The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH (organizer) (February 10-May 26, 2013).
Data retrieved from the Cleveland Museum of Art on October 8, 2026. The museum may have updated its record since.
Quick Overview
- Artist
- Thomas Gainsborough (British, 1727–1788)
- Date
- mid-1780s
- Medium
- watercolor, ink and oil paint heightened with white chalk ("Bristol lead white")
- Dimensions
- Sheet: 21.9 x 31.3 cm (8 5/8 x 12 5/16 in.)
- Type
- Drawing
- Classification
- Drawing
- Department
- Drawings
- Credit line
- Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund
- Accession no.
- 2006.156
More by Thomas Gainsborough in museum collections
Open-access museum record · AT-00011046
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