Cottage Children (The Wood Gatherers)
Medium
Oil on canvas
Dimensions
58 1/8 x 47 3/8 in. (147.6 x 120.3 cm)
Classification
Paintings
Department
European Paintings
Museum
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY
Credit
Bequest of Mary Stillman Harkness, 1950
Accession Number
50.145.17
Tags
Art Historical Context
Thomas Gainsborough’s *Cottage Children (The Wood Gatherers)* of 1787 captures a tender moment of rural childhood. Two young siblings pause from their task of collecting firewood, their simple clothing and the surrounding landscape evoking the quiet rhythms of eighteenth-century English country life. Painted in oil on canvas, the large-scale work reflects Gainsborough’s late-career interest in “fancy pictures”—imagined scenes that blend portraiture with landscape to suggest innocence and virtue. Gainsborough, celebrated for both elegant society portraits and atmospheric Suffolk landscapes, he...
About the Artist
Thomas Gainsborough · 1727–1788
Thomas Gainsborough was born on 14 May 1727 in Sudbury, Suffolk, the youngest of nine children to wool dealer John Gainsborough and his wife Mary. Demonstrating prodigious talent from childhood, he sketched landscapes in the local woods and fields, fostering his lifelong passion for the genre. At age thirteen, he moved to London, where he trained under the French engraver and illustrator Hubert-Fr...