CMA: Drawings

A Herdsman with Three Cows by an Upland Pool, Thomas Gainsborough, mid 1780s

Although he was one of the most celebrated society portraitists of his day, landscape painting was 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.

https://clevelandart.org/art/2006.156

Woman at the Spinet, François Bonvin, 1860

The subject of the woman at the piano was a recurrent theme in Bonvin’s oeuvre. The pianist depicted here was likely Céline Prunaire, a 21-year-old musician who married the much older artist in 1860. Although the meticulously rendered composition celebrates the grace and propriety of the young woman, the happiness of the couple’s union was fleeting. Prunaire left the artist after fewer than three years, never to return. The pink carnation at her feet suggests a note of foreboding to the image, perhaps intended to allude to the ephemeral nature of music and sentimental bonds.

https://clevelandart.org/art/2010.166

The Actor Clairval, Étienne Aubry, 18th century

https://clevelandart.org/art/2008.369

Trees and Undergrowth, Garden William Fraser, 1885

Garden’s work was based on the rendering of minute detail with painstaking brushwork and handling of color. Here, he describes an insignificant corner of the Bedford landscape: a tangled thicket in which dry grasses and saplings commingle. Bare branches stretch across a bright blue sky, creating a pattern as intricate as a spider’s web. This may have been the drawing that Garden exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1885 with the title Early Spring in the Woods. A pale green haze in the grass, the azure sky, and scattered wildflowers suggest the promise of spring.

https://clevelandart.org/art/1978.52