A Herdsman with Three Cows by an Upland Pool (mid-1780s): Art, History and Details

A Herdsman with Three Cows by an Upland Pool (mid-1780s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Thomas Gainsborough (British, 1727–1788).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Although he was one of the most celebrated society portraitists of his day, landscape painting was Thomas Gainsborough’s love and lifelong pleasure. Here, delicate layers of watercolor, ink, oil paint, and chalk result in a jewel-like work on paper. The composition combines the rural scene of a herdsman and three cows with an imagined, majestic mountain view, mingling the pastoral with the sublime. The sheet was among a group of 14 landscape drawings that Gainsborough selected as a gift for a close friend.

Object facts

• Title: A Herdsman with Three Cows by an Upland Pool
• Date: mid-1780s
• Creator attribution: Thomas Gainsborough (British, 1727–1788)
• Culture: England, 18th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: watercolor, ink and oil paint heightened with white chalk ("Bristol lead white")
• Dimensions: Sheet: 21.9 x 31.3 cm (8 5/8 x 12 5/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - British
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 2006.156

A detail from the museum

Following the instruction of the influential painter and writer Jonathan Richardson, Gainsborough often arranged his landscape compositions with the brightest passage—here, the white cow and billowing clouds—near the center.

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Fulcher, George. The Life of Thomas Gainsborough, R.A. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1856.
• Hayes, John. "The Gainsborough Drawings from Barton Grange: Eight Published for the First Time." Connoisseur 161 (February 1966): 86-93.
• Hayes, John. The Drawings of Thomas Gainsborough. New Haven: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press, 1971.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.