Wooded Landscape with Stream

Wooded Landscape with Stream — Thomas Gainsborough. 1750–59.

Medium: Brush and black ink and gray wash, over graphite, on off-white laid paper, pieced along both vertical edges and laid down on cream laid paper. Dimensions: 23.8 × 33.4 cm (9 3/8 × 13 3/16 in.).

Collection record: Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. Museum connection according to this source; current display unverified.

Though more in demand for his society portraits, Thomas Gainsborough expressed his passion for landscape subjects in hundreds of drawings executed throughout of his career. Early drawings made en plein air inspired later landscape sketches, such as this one, that combined directly observed natural elements with more idealized compositions found in the 17th-century French paintings admired by Gainsborough. Clusters of short, detached strokes convey the movement of the trees in the background while longer horizontal lines describe the placid surface of the water running through the scene.

Description: © Art Institute of Chicago, original record, CC BY 4.0. HTML formatting removed; wording retained. Other artwork metadata: CC0.

Source: official collection record. Metadata selected and normalized by Artline from the source export, accessed 10 September 2026; no museum endorsement. Reproduction rights are separate.