Wooded Landscape with a Herdsman Seated

This early landscape by Gainsborough was painted around the time that the artist returned to his hometown of Sudbury, following a period of training in London. It aptly demonstrates the strong influence of seventeenth-century Dutch landscapes on his work at this time. Simultaneously, it seems highly evocative of the countryside around Sudbury, in which Gainsborough spent his formative years as a b…