MASP

Thomas Gainsborough

Drinkstone Park (The Woods of Cornard [?]), 1747

  • Author:
    Thomas Gainsborough
  • Bio:
    Sudbury, Inglaterra, 1727-Londres, Inglaterra ,1788
  • Title:
    Drinkstone Park (The Woods of Cornard [?])
  • Date:
    1747
  • Medium:
    Óleo sobre tela
  • Dimensions:
    146 x 156,5 x 4 cm
  • Credit line:
    Doação Santos Vahlis, 1951
  • Object type:
    Pintura
  • Inventory number:
    MASP.00198
  • Photography credits:
    João Musa

TEXTS



Gainsborough is a key figure of the landscape painting that characterized 18th-century English art. He was born in the small town of Sudbury, northeast England, but studied in London and attended a printmaking studio, as well as St Martin’s Lane Academy, a forerunner of the Royal Academy. After that period, Gainsborough moved to Bath, a seaside resort town much visited by the elites, who proved eager to buy his artworks. In Drinkstone Park (The Woods of Cornard?) (c. 1747), the dense clouds create a diffuse lighting, equally illuminating the greens as well as the browns of the landscape. In the scene, a man is sleeping alongside a road, amidst a wooded grove. His presence, however, is only a detail in the scene, where the leading role is played by the vegetation. This thematic inversion from man to nature was common in the language of landscape painting in England at that time; compositions involved curved roads, empty areas, trees and groves arranged asymmetrically in the painting, in such a way as to interrupt a complete view of the landscape, arousing the sensation that the spectator is walking in the landscape. The title of the artwork shows that there is some doubt surrounding the place depicted in the painting: it could be Cornard Woodland, which was the setting of other works by the artist, including the similar canvas in the collection of the National Gallery of London; or it could be Drinkstone Park, since the park’s owner was also the owner of this canvas.

— MASP Curatorial Team, 2017




By Luciano Migliaccio
Waterhouse opens the chapter of his 1958 catalogue devoted to “Landscapes of the earlier Suffolk period” with this painting settling, from the very outset, a dispute about the theme and its title: “it is not, as usually stated a view of Drinkstone Park, but a free variation on a picture by J. Ruysdael (Louvre), of which Gainsborough made a chalk copy” (p. 107, n. 826). Despite this impasse, the coincidence that the work was commissioned or purchased in the artist’s studio by Joshua Grigby, the author of Drinkstone Park who, incidentally, subsequently sat for the artist (Camesasca 1988, p. 16o), should be noted. The work in question, The Forest by Ruysdael, is at the Musée of Douai and the beautiful drawing, really a true copy of the painting, dated by Hayes to the late 40s, belongs to the Whitworth Art Gallery of the University of Manchester, in England (Woodall 1949, p. 26). With reference to the work on display at Masp, it is of course possible to agree with Waterhouse, insofar as we interpret the notion “free variation” according to its prevailing sense, i.e., as a reproduction based on some of the elements of Ruysdael’s work, and accept the fact that the Manchester drawing was itself revised based on a print, perhaps by Geissler. Hayes (1981, p. 182) states that “this elaborate drawing of The Forest taught him (i.e. Gainsborough) much, as he used the poplar birch in several of his landscapes of that period, and its composition as a whole underpins the most elaborate of his first works, the canvas known by the name Gainsborough Forest (National Gallery, London), as well as the painting on display in São Paulo”. The London work is also called The Woods of Cornard and therefore, the work at Masp may very well represent a trade-off between the Dutch model and the actual landscape. This reason led Camesasca to propose, hypothetically, an alternative title for the work on display at Masp: The Woods of Cornard. Hayes (1982, p. 347) dates Masp work to 1747 owing to its close kinship with the Rest by the Way of the Philadelphia Museum of Art of that same year, the only work dated by Gainsborough himself (Baetjer 1993, p. 104). Drinkstone Park is the largest landscape painted by Gainsborough until the Bath period. To Hayes, the execution is much more relaxed and mature than that of all the previous paintings and until 1763, date of the Worcester landscape sent by the artist to the London Society of Artists’ exhibition, there is no other work by the artist of comparable scale. The theme depicting the subject asleep at the edge of the trail is found, in Gainsborough, only in this work and in that of Philadelphia, and is likely to stem from the influence of Berchem (Hayes 1981, p. 97). A copy of approximately the same size, perhaps by Francis Towne, is found in the Leicester Museums and Art Gallery. Camesasca (1987, p. 146) remarks that the structure of the painting is based, as was typical of the young Gainsborough, in three “spots” or points of attention, as well as in a resumption of motifs used in previous works, in the manner of the Flemish landscape painters, whom the painter enjoyed emulating, as he discloses in a letter. The portrait belonged to the reverend Robert Bolton Collection, who emigrated in 1836 to the United States, where he built the Bolton Priory, in Pelham, New York, in 1838. The portrait was be queathed to the daughter of the reverend, Nanette Bolton, who left it to her sister, Adele, who passed it on to her niece Arabella J. Bolton and it left her estate to enter the museum. Waterhouse dates the painting to the 70s, i.e., the period when Gainsborough had already consolidated a huge clientele in Bath, anxious to be portrayed during their sojourn in the town. The painting was lent to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, from March 13 to July 11, 1912.

— Luciano Migliaccio, 1998

Source: Luiz Marques (org.), Catalogue of the Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo: MASP, 1998. (new edition, 2008).



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