Thomas Gainsborough (1727-1788) was, with his rival Sir Joshua Reynolds, one of the two most important British painters of the eighteenth century, and is credited alongside Richard Wilson as the originator of the native British landscape school. Born in Sudbury, Suffolk, the youngest of nine children of a weaver and maker of woollen goods, he showed precocious talent, sketching the woods and fields around his home from an early age; a self-portrait head and small landscapes are said to date from around the time he was ten. At thirteen he left for London to train under the French illustrator Hubert-François Gravelot, becoming associated with the circle around William Hogarth and Francis Hayman at St Martin's Lane Academy, where he would also have encountered the Continental art trade and the private collections that exposed him to seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painting, an influence that remained with him throughout his career.
Gainsborough returned to Suffolk in the late 1740s, working first from Sudbury and then Ipswich as a portrait painter to the local gentry and mercantile classes, while continuing to paint the landscapes that gave him, by his own account, greater satisfaction than the "curs'd face business" that provided his living. His early Suffolk landscapes, admired for their direct, unforced naturalism, show a close study of Jacob van Ruisdael and other Dutch masters applied to the specific topography around his home; his friend and biographer Philip Thicknesse wrote that there was scarcely a tree or hedgerow for miles around Sudbury that Gainsborough did not carry perfectly in his mind's eye. He moved to Bath in 1759, where increasingly sophisticated patronage brought him into closer contact with the work of Van Dyck and other Old Masters, and by the 1770s, now established in London, he had become one of the most fashionable portrait painters of his day and a favourite of George III and the royal family. A founding member of the Royal Academy in 1768, he remained throughout his career more personally attached to landscape than to the portraiture on which his reputation and income chiefly rested.
The painting by Gainsborough held by John Mitchell Fine Paintings, a wooded landscape with a herdsman reclining near a weir dating from around 1753, belongs to this formative Suffolk period, when Gainsborough was working in the immediate aftermath of his London training and developing the naturalistic, Dutch-influenced idiom that would distinguish his landscape work from that of most contemporaries. Paintings from this phase of Gainsborough's career, before his move to Bath transformed him into a portraitist of national standing, are comparatively scarce and are of particular interest to collectors and scholars tracing the early development of one of the central figures in British art.