Cornard Wood, near Sudbury, Suffolk
The painting Cornard Wood, near Sudbury, Suffolk (1748) depicts wood located two miles from Sudbury, the artist’s place of birth. Cornard Wood was common land situated on the outskirts of the village of Great Cornard. Gainsborough painted the view from Abbas Hall, looking towards the village of Great Henny with the church of St. Mary’s Great Henny appearing in the background.
Since the woods were not private property, the villagers could gather wood, graze donkeys and horses, dig marl for manure or sand for building materials, or simply take a walk on the path to Great Henny. In the painting, the artist depicts the activities that embody the spirit of the countryside: two donkeys stand on a mound, a man is resting from digging while a lady sits nearby, another man cuts and ties firewood, and travelers head towards Great Henny on foot and on horseback.
In a letter Gainsborough wrote in 1788 he revealed that the landscape was painted in 1748 at a time when he was still learning his craft. Gainsborough began teaching himself to paint by studying and copying landscapes of 17th-century Dutch artists, particularly Jan Wijnants and Jacob van Ruisdael. Dutch landscapes appealed to artists who preferred a more naturalistic approach to the ideal classical landscapes of French painters like Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin. The young artist could have familiarized himself with these paintings in the East Anglian collections as well as in the form of engravings. Additionally, the East Anglia countryside with its wetlands, ponds, and windmills shared similarities with the Netherlands’ landscape. Like in Ruisdael’s wooded scenes such as Peasant Cottage in a Landscape (c. 1646), Gainsborough scatters human figures around the woodland to create a harmonious and humble atmosphere. It has even been suggested that Gainsborough painted some of these early landscapes hoping to attract a clientele that was fond of Dutch art.
Later in life, Gainsborough expressed a fondness and nostalgia for these early works, since he believed they demonstrated his lifelong commitment to landscape painting. He wrote about Cornard Wood, near Sudbury, Suffolk: “though there is very little idea of composition in the picture, the touch and closeness to nature […"> are equal to any of my later productions”. He also revealed that in a period of 40 years the painting was held by 20 different picture dealers and that at one point he even bought the painting back for himself. For a few years, the painting belonged to David Pike Watts, the uncle of the English landscape painter John Constable. Thus, Constable likely knew and admired the painting. He was born in the same area as Gainsborough and was also inspired by the local landscape. In 1800, when Constable was painting near Woodbridge in Suffolk, he wrote: “It is a most delightful country for a landscape painter, I fancy I see Gainsborough in every hedge and hollow tree”.
