The Shepherd Boy

Artist Thomas Gainsborough (British, 1727-1788)

Place of OriginEngland

Dateabout 1757-1759

Dimensions(Oval) H: 32 1/2 in. (82.5 cm); W: 25 1/2 in. (64.8 cm)

MediumOil on canvas.

ClassificationPaintings

Credit LineGift of Arthur J. Secor

Object number

1933.21

On View

Toledo Museum of Art (2445 Monroe Street), Gallery, 27

Collections

Paintings

Published ReferencesFulcher, G.W., Life of Gainsborough, London, 1856, p. 235.

Engraved by George Sanders for Henry Graves' Folio of Gainsborough's Works, published in 1871.

Godwin, Blake-More, Catalogue of European Paintings, Toledo, 1939, p. 290, repr. p.291.

Armstrong, W., Life of Gainsborough, London, n.d., p. 205.

Waterhouse, E.K., Gainsborough, London, 1958, p. 35, no. 836, pl. 34.

Riefstahl, R., "What is Conservation?", Toledo Museum of Art Museum News, VII, Autumn, 1965, p. 57, repr.

Crombie, Theodore, "London Galleries: England's Taste for Europe," Apollo, no. 78, Aug. 1968, repr. p. 135.

Glendinning, Sally, Thomas Gainsborough, Artist of England, Champaign, IL, 1969, repr. (col.) p. 75.

Hayes, J., The Drawings of Thomas Gainsborough, London, 1970, p. 27, in no. 865.

Toledo Museum of Art, The Toledo Museum of Art, European Paintings, Toledo, 1976, pp. 60-61, pl. 314.

Morse, John D., Old Master Paintings in North America New York, 1979, p. 136.

Andrews, Peter, "A View of Toledo," Connoisseur, vol. 212, no. 849, Nov. 1982, repr. (col.) p. 109.

Hayes, John, The Landscape Paintings of Thomas Gainsborough, London, 1982, no. 69, pp. 63, 76, 406, 407, repr. p. 406.

Hayes, John and Lindsay Stainton, Gainsborough Drawings, Washington D.C., 1983, p. 56 (not in exhib.).

Steward, James Christen, The New Child: British Art and the Origins of Modern Childhood, 1730-1830, Berkeley, 1995, p. 184, fig. 80, p. 185.

Belsey, Hugh, Thomas Gainsborough: A Country Life, Munich, Prestel, 2002, pp. 75-76, fig. 53, (col.), p. 77.

Exhibition HistoryLondon, British Institution, 1861, no. 214.

London, Grosvenor Gallery, A Century of British Art, 1737-1837, no. 218 (by F.G. Stephens).

Paris, Exposition universelle, 1900, Royal Pavilion, no. 48.

London, Royal Academy, Exhibition of Old Masters, 1903, no. 122.

Milwaukee Art Institute, Three Centuries of British Painting, 1946.

London, Kenwood House, The French Taste in English Painting, 1968, no. 41.

Baltimore, Walters Art Gallery, Maryland Heritage, 1976, no. 4, repr. p. 14.

Ferrara, Palazzo dei Diamanti, Thomas Gainsborough, 1998, no. 36, p. 134, repr. (col.).

Label TextThomas 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.”