The Shepherd Boy
Artist: Thomas Gainsborough (British, 1727-1788)
Date: about 1757-1759
Dimensions:
(Oval) H: 32 1/2 in. (82.5 cm); W: 25 1/2 in. (64.8 cm)
Medium: Oil on canvas.
Classification: Paintings
Credit Line: Gift of Arthur J. Secor
Object number: 1933.21
Label Text:Thomas Gainsborough painted this picture for his friend, Robert Edgar, one of his earliest patrons. It is an example of a genre known at the time as a “fancy picture”—an idealized scene of rural life with carefully posed and sentimentalized peasants.
Edgar was a lawyer, a fact apparently unknown to Gainsborough when they met, as evidenced by a letter the artist wrote to his patron: “I little thought you were a lawyer when I said not one in ten was worth hanging…It’s too late to ask your pardon now, but really, Sir, I never saw one of your profession look so honest in my life, and that’s the reason I concluded you were in the wool trade.”
Edgar was a lawyer, a fact apparently unknown to Gainsborough when they met, as evidenced by a letter the artist wrote to his patron: “I little thought you were a lawyer when I said not one in ten was worth hanging…It’s too late to ask your pardon now, but really, Sir, I never saw one of your profession look so honest in my life, and that’s the reason I concluded you were in the wool trade.”
On view
In Collection(s)