Thomas Gainsborough, R.A. (Sudbury, Suffolk 1727-1788 London)

In this vigorous drawing of the 1770s Gainsborough uses white, black and brown chalks and blue paper to great effect. The drawing has survived in good condition. The highlights are not in the form of patches of sunlight, as is usually the case in his landscapes, but a puff of smoke from a limekiln and residue from the kiln that dusts the grassy bank in the middle of the composition. The action of a man with a long stick, perched at the edge of the kiln, causes the smoke to rise. As John Hayes noted, an 'industrial' landscape of this kind is very unusual for Gainsborough.

There may be a specific reason for the depiction of this subject. In the late 1760s the artist's friend Philip Thicknesse, who was habitually short of money, hoped to recoup some of his losses through the construction of a limekiln. Thicknesse, one-time Governor of Landguard Fort in Essex, was a notoriously difficult character, but maintained a relationship with Gainsborough and became his first biographer. The two had met in 1753 when Gainsborough lived in Ipswich, but both subsequently moved west, Gainsborough to Bath and Thicknesse to an estate in Monmouthshire, near Pontypool. There is evidence that Gainsborough visited 'Quoitca', which Thicknesse inherited from a member of his wife's family, in the early 1770s.