Artwork · 18th century · Thomas Gainsborough

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Cottage Children (The Wood Gatherers)

Thomas Gainsborough1787Oil on canvas147.6 × 120.3 cm

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At a glance

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At the edge of a dark wood, a country girl holds her little brother or sister, while a red-haired boy sits beside her hugging a bundle of sticks.
Thomas Gainsborough painted it in oil on canvas in 1787, the year before he died.
On a canvas nearly five feet tall, he gave poor children gathering firewood the same size and space as a grand portrait.

Reading the picture

5 places to look closer

Tap a number on the painting to jump to its note, or a close-up to see that spot in the whole picture.

Zoom in on the toddler at the upper right. A fair-haired little one, held in the girl's arms, stretches one hand out wide. The white sleeve and red clothes are just a few quick dabs of paint.
Look at the girl's face. Dark hair falls over her forehead, and she tilts her head and looks straight at us. The toddler looks away, but she meets our eyes. Her lips are closed and her brows droop slightly.
Zoom in on the boy at the lower left. He has red hair and pink cheeks, and he clutches a dark bundle to his chest. Going by the title, The Wood Gatherers, it reads as a bundle of gathered sticks. He turns his head toward the right, the same way the toddler points.
At the very bottom, near the center, look for a bare foot resting on the ground. It glows faintly reddish-brown in the dark. The toddler, too, dangles a bare foot from the girl's arms. These children are out in the woods without shoes.
Look at the tree in the upper left. A thin, leafless branch zigzags up into the sky, while the leaves below all lean one way, as if blown by the wind. Each clump of leaves is a fast swipe of orange and brown. Across the sky, fine cracks have formed as the paint aged.

When it was painted

In 1787 Gainsborough was sixty, living and working in Schomberg House, a grand house on Pall Mall in London. He had made his name painting lords, ladies, and wealthy patrons. In his last years, though, he kept returning to large pictures of poor country children. These are known as his fancy pictures.

Even his great rival admired them. Sir Joshua Reynolds, president of the Royal Academy, bought Gainsborough's fancy picture Girl with Pigs. For years the two men had been rivals at the top of the London art world.

Gainsborough had been a founding member of the Royal Academy in 1768. But in 1784 he quarreled with the Academy over how high one of his pictures would be hung, and he stopped sending work to its exhibitions. Instead he showed paintings to visitors in his own home.

In the spring after he finished this canvas, Gainsborough fell ill with cancer in his neck. He wrote to Reynolds asking to see him, and Reynolds came. Gainsborough died in August 1788. That December, Reynolds paid tribute to him in a lecture at the Academy.

The museum's records name the painting's first owner as Lord Porchester, Henry Herbert, who later became Earl of Carnarvon. It stayed with his family for more than a century. In 1881 it was lent to the Royal Academy's winter exhibition, under the title The Wood Gatherers. Look once more at the girl's eyes. Painted a year before the artist died, they still meet ours straight on.

The painter

Thomas Gainsborough

1727–1788

When painting this, the artist was about 60 years old

All paintings by Thomas Gainsborough →

More by the same painter

Wooded Upland Landscapeprobably 1783

Queen Charlotte1788

Questions to think about

Look for itWhere is the toddler pointing, and where is the boy looking?
Why?Why do you think Gainsborough painted children gathering firewood on a canvas as big as a lord's portrait?
What about you?The children in this picture gather fuel and care for a baby. Today, some children carry so much housework and caregiving that school suffers. How would we even notice them?

Same period