Fishing from the Shoreline

Fishing from the Shoreline of around 1760, at Fairfax House in York, belongs to Gainsborough's developing series of rural recreational subjects that depicted the meditative activities of the English countryside alongside the agricultural labor subjects of his Ipswich period. Fishing in the eighteenth century was simultaneously a practical food-gathering activity for the rural poor and a gentleman's recreational pursuit, and Gainsborough's treatment appears to observe the former — working men at the water's edge — rather than the latter. The water subject gave him the opportunity to explore the specific quality of light at the edge of an inland waterway, where reflections and the light's diffusion through moisture created atmospheric effects very different from his woodland and agricultural subjects. By 1760 he was receiving Bath commissions regularly and his prices were rising; landscape subjects like this one were sold relatively cheaply to collectors who valued them as demonstrations of his personal artistic vision rather than as formal commissions. Fairfax House in York, a Georgian townhouse restored to its original splendor, holds the work in a context that connects it to the domestic display contexts for which such intimate landscapes were intended.

The coastal light — brighter and more expansive than Gainsborough's usual woodland settings — challenges his landscape manner in productive ways. The figures fishing from the shore provide human interest without overwhelming the natural setting, the overall effect one of peaceful leisure in a convincing outdoor space.