The great school of Nature

I FANCY I see Gainsborough in every hedge and hollow tree,’ wrote John Constable when painting near Wood-bridge in Suffolk in 1800. Twelve years had passed since Thomas Gainsborough’s death. For Constable—whose uncle, David Pike Watts, previously owned Gainsborough’s finest early landscape, Cornard Wood of 1748—the vision of the older painter, who had been influenced by Dutch Golden Age landscapists, including Ruisdael and Wynants, offered potent inspiration.

It was a tribute Gainsborough himself would have appreciated. Throughout his life, the Suffolk-born artist delighted in landscape painting. Months short of his death, he remembered with pleasure ‘closeness to nature… equal to any of my later productions’; he had revisited Dutch landscape painting repeatedly, including, as late as 1777, Rubens’s minutely detailed of about 1615, which Gainsborough reimagined in the fading light of late afternoon. He drew the