Landscape in Suffolk

Landscape in Suffolk from 1748 in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna is one of Gainsborough's earliest surviving landscapes, made when he was approximately twenty-one and still deeply under the influence of the Dutch seventeenth-century masters whose paintings he had studied in London and in the country houses of East Anglia. The specific location in Suffolk is unknown — Gainsborough at this period was beginning to move away from topographic record toward composed landscape invention — but the fresh, naturalistic observation of the flat Suffolk countryside with its high skies and low horizons is unmistakable. The Kunsthistorisches Museum's presence as the holding institution reflects the Austrian imperial collection's sustained acquisition of Northern European art over several centuries; the painting entered the collection at some point before its documented presence in Vienna.

The early landscape shows the young Gainsborough's fresh, direct response to Suffolk scenery, using naturalistic observation before his later move toward idealization.