th a recurrent source of pictorial inspiration, so that at the outset of his career the ground was prepared for his development on two lines, the first realist and the second decorative. Portraits which combined the charmes of the conversation piece with those of landscape made a strong appeal to the country gentry. Gainsborough’s attack on high society was a flank one. His subjects possessed the grace and elegance more frequently found in cottages than in Courts. Matthew Pillkington describes him as follows: “His genius, taste and abilities qualified him to execute subjects of history with general applause; yet, his favourit subjects were the rural ones, as large as life, in different attitudes and amusements.” Chauncey Brewster Tinker noted a number of parallels between the fancy pictures of Gainsborough and early romantic poets like Thomson, Gray, Burns and “the young Wordsworth”. His affinity with Gray has been precisely described by Lord Clark: “The picture of rustic life in Gray’s Elegy... is the result of sincere contemplation by a mind so elegant and discriminating that natural roughnesses are hardly perceived. Exactly the same is true of Gainsborough... For him the village children who run to lisp their sire’s return, or climb his knees the envied kiss to share arranged themselves in groups as elegant as Gray’s diction; and when he sat down to draw cows, his pencil instinctively traced a visual equivalent to “the lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea’”... To read the Elegy in front of the canvases of Gainsborough heightens our pleasure in both...” Like Gray, Gainsborough brought to the observation of rustics the sensibilities of the Man of Feeling, so that Constable could refer justly to “the canvasses of this most benevolent and kind-hearted man. “The Cottage Door” in t...
