Travellers passing through a village

The present fine and strongly coloured drawing dates from the early 1770s. At this time Gainsborough was using combinations of watercolour ink, chalks and varnishes in a highly unconventional and imaginative manner. The central group of a wagon and horses closely echoes the artist's well-known oil The Harvest Waggon (Barber Institute, Birmingham), usually dated to the mid-1760s, and anticipates his second oil on the same theme (Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto), a painting of 1784-85. The brilliant white used to portray shafts of sunlight may be the 'Bristol made white lead which you buy in lumps at any house painters' recommended by Gainsborough to his friend William Jackson in 1773, a pigment that he fixed using skimmed milk. A number of other mixed media drawings made around the same time are all of approximately the same size; many are now in public collections. One of the artist's stated intentions at this time was to invest drawings with the depth and intensity of oil paintings. The only drawings he ever sent to London exhibitions were two groups 'in imitation of oil paintings' shown at the Royal Academy in 1772 (nos. 98 and 99, totalling ten drawings). These were taken from Bath to London for him by the painter Zoffany, who visited Gainsborough, probably in order to paint his portrait for inclusion in his group portrait of the Royal Academicians.