Landscape with two cows with a shepherd and a milkmaid

Landscape with Two Cows, a Shepherd and a Milkmaid, painted around 1786 and now in the Dordrechts Museum in the Netherlands, belongs to Gainsborough's late London period when his landscape subjects were achieving a new atmospheric freedom that contemporary critics found both admirable and troubling. By 1786 he had only two years to live, and his late landscapes show an increasing technical radicalism — the forms dissolving into pure atmospheric suggestion, the brushwork becoming more openly expressive — that prefigures the Romantic landscape revolution of Constable and Turner. The pastoral subject of milking and tending cattle was among the oldest in Western European landscape painting, but Gainsborough treats it here with the feathery, charged brushwork of his late manner that transforms agricultural routine into something approaching the poetic and the sublime. The work's presence in a Dutch museum reflects both the European recognition of his achievements and the Dutch landscape tradition's formative role in his own development: it is fitting that a painter so deeply influenced by Dutch pastoral painting should have his work collected in the Netherlands. The late landscapes' combination of pastoral convention and atmospheric radicalism makes them among the most influential works in the transition from Georgian landscape to Romantic naturalism.

The late landscape shows Gainsborough's most poetic and atmospheric manner, with figures and animals dissolved into a golden, shimmering light. The brushwork is extraordinarily free, the entire scene painted with rapid, confident strokes that suggest rather than describe, creating an effect of dreamy rural beauty.