THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH (1727-88)
A figure in a landscape
c.1775-80RCIN 453587
Although Thomas Gainsborough was one of the most fashionable portrait painters of his era, he professed to have found landscape a more sympathetic subject. He produced a large number of free chalk sketches of landscape scenes. His contemporaries record that Gainsborough would construct three-dimensional landscape models in his studio, using sand and clay for the earth, broccoli for distant trees and lumps of coal for rocks.