Thomas Gainsborough: Experiments in Drawing

Alfred Mac Adam | The Brooklyn Rail | 5th June 2018

Facing huge demand for his society portraits, Gainsborough relaxed by drawing landscapes. And he wasn’t just doodling. Unlike highly geometric French landscapes, he showed “picturesque” nature – irregular and meandering. It was a new vision of nature making him the “progenitor of an English landscape tradition” carried forward by Constable and Turner. “He was a one-man avant-garde.”