Cotmania. Vol. XI. 1935-6

Gainsborough never actually worked out of doors. While he gained his inspiration from Nature, his painting is no literal transcription but a distillation of emotions felt in her presence. It is a music of the eyes, a melody of the heart. "One part of a picture," he wrote in a letter, "ought to be the first part of a tune, that you guess what follows, and that makes the second part of the tune." John Ruskin said of his landscapes : "They are rather motives of feeling and colour than earnest studies."
When living in Bath, he is known to have composed his landscapes with the aid of a model theatre of which an eye-witness has left us an interesting account. "I had the honour to be acquainted with that truly British genius at Bath, and have more than once sat by him of an evening and seen him make models - or rather thoughts - for the landscape scenery on a little old fashioned folding oak table, which stood under the dresser. This table, held sacred for the purpose, he would order to be brought to his parlour, and thereon compose his designs. He would place cork or coal for his foregrounds; make middle grounds of sand or clay, bushes of mosses and lichen, and set up distant woods of broccoli." Reynolds also mentioned this in his Obituary Discourse. "He framed," wrote Reynolds, "a kind of model of landscapes on his table; composed of broken stones, dried leaves, and pieces of looking-glass, which he magnified and improved into rocks, trees and water."
Gainsborough seems to have discovered some fundamental and permanent basis of pictorial appeal. His free and simple summary of natural forms contains that rhythmic vitality which the great Chinese painters have always regarded as the primary attribute of a good picture. And this quality of movement is held in a restraint within a classical convention of composition which makes his work survive the various ideals of European art that have had a short-lived vogue since his day.

Extract from the introduction (by Victor Rienaecker) to the Catalogue of an Exh[ibitio]n of drawings by Thos (sic) Gainsborough at
The Oxford Arts Club
June and July
1935?