Wooded Landscape with Stream

Museum record 149041: Wooded Landscape with Stream by Thomas Gainsborough. A verified entry point for discovery.

What to notice

For Wooded Landscape with Stream (record 149041), start with modern, expressive, atmospheric. Compare the focal subject, edge treatment, and atmosphere before moving on.

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Though more in demand for his society portraits, Thomas Gainsborough expressed his passion for landscape subjects in hundreds of drawings executed throughout of his career. Early drawings made en plein air inspired later landscape sketches, such as this one, that combined directly observed natural elements with more idealized compositions found in the 17th-century French paintings admired by Gainsborough. Clusters of short, detached strokes convey the movement of the trees in the background while longer…