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Thomas Gainsborough

1727 - 1788

Wooded Landscape with Church, Cow and Figure by Thomas Gainsborough
 

Wooded Landscape with Church, Cow and Figure   c.1750-54

  Original etching by Thomas Gainsborough, finished in etching and engraving by Joseph Wood.
With the artists’ names in the plate.
Ref: Hayes 1 iii/iii
S 317 x 240 mm; P 239 x 187 mm; I 101 x 155 mm
SOLD
 
Thomas Gainsborough’s first recorded original etching.

Very good impression as first issued for Joshua Kirby’s Dr. Brook Taylor’s Method of Perspective Made Easy, published in Ipswich in 1754.

One of the few original prints by Thomas Gainsborough to have been published in his lifetime, Wooded Landscape with Church, Cow and Figure comes from the small group of pure etchings which Gainsborough produced during his early Suffolk period. His first recorded original etched work, this plate, like two others of his four Suffolk etchings (The Gypsies and The Suffolk Plough), was left unfinished. The plate was finished, with some slight refinements, by the engraver Joseph Wood prior to its publication in 1754. Wood is known to have re-inforced the sky with cross-hatching.

Both this etching and the book in which it was issued are now rare. Printed on a large vertical sheet together with an engraving by Wood, as first issued. On warm white wove paper with full margins and deckle edge. Faint traces of creasing in margins of sheet, otherwise very good condition