Coastal Landscape with a Shepherd and His Flock

Thomas Gainsborough, between 1783 and 1784

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Artist: Thomas Gainsborough (British, 1727–1788)
Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 25 x 30 inches (63.5 x 76.2 cm)
Museum: Yale Center for British Art
Rights: CC0 — no rights reserved

Late in life, Thomas Gainsborough devoted increasing attention to landscapes, exploring a new departure in the form of seascapes and coastlines. These experiments, coupled with a second visit to Flanders in 1783, helped him develop a late style, an approach to painting that was highly picturesque in brushwork and subtle in coloring.

This coastal landscape is characteristic of that style but is also unusual, as he combines a coastline with his more familiar fondness for the pastoral imagery of shepherds and their flocks. The silvery light and ethereal nature of the scenery consciously evoke old master painting and demand that we take the landscapes as serious works of art, something akin to the seriousness of poetry. This example was bought shortly after it was painted by William Hamilton Nisbet, one of the wealthiest landowners in Scotland.

Text: Yale Center for British Art.