By Helen Miller and Michael Strand

Surprisingly, the 17th- and 18th-century drawings and prints in Pastoral on Paper proffer bold experiments in charcoal, chalk, and gouache.

The Clark Art Institute, nestled in the bucolic hills of Williamstown, MA, is the perfect setting for Pastoral on Paper, an intimate exhibition of 17th and 18th century drawings and prints from their collection on view through June 15. The show’s focus on the representation of pastoral life doesn’t sufficiently address what is in store for visitors who take in these modestly sized works, elegantly arrayed across three galleries in the institute’s Manton Research Center. The rural scenography of painters like Claude Lorrain and Thomas Gainsborough—the two featured artists in the show—is not the most enticing part of this important exhibition. The show’s value has much more to do with what is revealed about the nature of their drawing.

Lorrain, born in France, worked in Rome from the 1620s until his death in 1682. Gainsborough lived and worked in England from 1727 to 1788. Spanning the Baroque and Rococo periods in European art, they painted for Catholic Popes (in Lorrain’s case), the nobility, and an emerging bourgeoisie. Lorrain and Gainsborough both came from humble origins, and yet both died wealthy men because they painted in ways that satisfied the ruling classes. For Lorrain, this meant commissioned sea- and landscape paintings of great scale: his vistas combine ruins, classical architecture, Biblical tales, and idealized pastoral life. He was influenced by northern European mannerists working in Rome at the time, such as Adam Elsheimer, as well as painters from Bologna reworking classical tropes, among them Annibale Carracci. For Gainsborough, portraiture proved to be the key to success, though throughout his life he was drawn to landscape. Dutch masters like Jan Wijants, Jacob van Ruisdael, and Peter Paul Rubens — working in the “topographical” tradition — left their mark on Gainsborough’s landscapes, where familiar country settings of rolling hills and woods are depicted with naturalistic accuracy. Lorrain, in contrast, painted fanciful landscapes to evoke grandeur and high drama.

In the exhibited sketches, we can see these landscape elements at play, but we can also see the varied purposes to which each painter put the medium. Lorrain’s drawing Landscape with Rest on the Flight into Egypt (c. 1660) is a study in black chalk, brown ink, and brown and gray wash, heightened with white on beige paper depicting Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus in flight from King Herod’s wrath. The less than ideal figures (in terms of anatomical accuracy) huddle underneath an Italian cypress tree alongside a small pond where a cow drinks calmly. A similar scene would find its way into one of his history paintings of the same name; Lorrain did several of this Biblical story. As is typical in Lorrain’s pictures, an imagined landscape extends into the background. Ever the classicist, Lorrain uses drawing to practice achieving harmony and balance, rendering narrative and landscape into a complementary pair (despite a decided lack of skill in depicting people).

Another of Lorrain’s drawings, A View of Sant’Agnese Fuori le Mura (c. 1650-55), depicts a 7th-century basilica, transported from its actual location on Rome’s Via Nomentana to an idealized landscape. The building is surrounded by a grove of oak trees, with mountains rising in the distance. Lorrain’s finished landscapes are nearly all populated with classical ruins. Here, drawing serves Lorrain as a sort of ancestor of the smartphone — images are recorded to plug and play with later on. For him, transposition of images from drawings was a commonplace strategy.

While Lorrain’s works in the show are pulled from a thirty-year span at the height of his career, Gainsborough’s all come from the last decade or so of his life. This is the period when the artist produced his so-called “fancy pictures” — idyllic, sentimentalized scenes of children and animals in rural settings. One of the most celebrated and monetarily successful English painters of his generation, Gainsborough is generally believed to have done these at least in part for his own pleasure. It was a way of vicariously returning to the wooded regions of his youth after living for decades in the high society of Bath and on London’s Pall Mall. But while his six sketches in the show were made during the “fancy pictures” period, there are stark and compelling differences.

Gainsborough, it is said, would often sketch in his idle hours — after dinner for example — throwing the drawings he did not like under the table and giving away the ones he did like. His version of being a “Sunday painter” took the form of an open drawing time, when he felt most liberated. The results appear strikingly modern, both in their heightened mark making and painterly experimentation. In the background of Wooded Landscape with Shepherd and Sheep, Winding River and Tower (mid- to late 1770s), for instance, buildings are sketched in black and then half-covered in white. In the remaining “untouched” spaces on the paper, blocky, shadowy structures like the titular tower appear… as if by magic, chance, and the artist’s improvisational skill.

In Wooded Landscape with a Cottage and Cows (c. mid-1770s) Gainsborough uses black chalk and watercolor to animate a simple rural scene: cows wander on the left, a small cottage can be seen behind them. Hills appear in the foreground, their realistic dimensions visualized in hatched lines and variegated, flowing infill. The scene is still, though the marks are anything but static. Their angles, energy, and geometry bring the piece to life — trees sway in the breeze, cows search for water, clouds billow in the sky. The effect on the viewer recalls Gainsborough’s shimmering portraits and his incomparable ability to conjure a sitter’s unique facial expression.

In Landscape with Figures, Herdsman and Cattle at a Pool, and Distant Church (c. mid to late- 1780s), Gainsborough imagines a scene that, in content and form, comes closest to Lorrain. In watercolor and gouache on beige paper, varnished with mastic, a natural resin, figures are created via an expert, lucid line that is never overdone. A storm brews in the sky above a distant town, capped by a towering church steeple. Echoing this vertical, a half-dead tree provides respite for herdsmen. The mood evokes romanticism, but the vibrancy of Gainsborough’s hillsides intimate the future, foreshadowing Vincent van Gogh’s golden fields.

This exhilarating encounter with Gainsborough brings the best of Lorrain to light. Gainsborough’s six landscape drawings, placed in the middle of Lorrain’s pastorals, enliven the latter’s embrace of the formulaic. The rhythmic placement of pines, herds, and distant buildings in Lorrain’s Pastoral Landscape with Trees (c. 1640) demonstrates what we now call the “rule of thirds.” Dividing the page horizontally and vertically, Lorrain uses black chalk and brown wash to provide a glimpse here and there of sheep, cattle, and their supervising shepherds; the groups are shaded by a couple of tall trees. Glancing over this composition after looking at the neighboring pictures by Gainsborough, we are invited to see beyond Lorrain’s Lego-esque structures and figurines. What attracts attention is the delicate curve, with gracefully carved shadows, that dances in and around the leaves and branches. Lorrain probably sketched this picture en plein air, and we can see a more spontaneous, free hand at work.

In Pastoral on Paper, the radical nature of the marks can be awe-inspiring, particularly Gainsborough’s. Our impression here aligns with a 2018 show of Gainsborough’s drawings at The Morgan Library & Museum in New York, which inspired a reappraisal of his technical innovation and avant-garde orientation. Long associated with the beginnings of agriculture and capitalism, the picturesque rural landscape may also, ironically, contain the seeds of what would become the modern imagination. In spite of 18th-century England’s reputation for being conservative, its stability flagrantly idealized, this little show suggests an alternative. Pastoral on Paper proffers bold experiments in charcoal, chalk,  gouache, varnish, glaze, and even skim milk (which allowed Gainsborough to both fix and manipulate the other materials). If only for a moment — or a flash — they rise above the era’s customarily restrained depictions of human and animal life, pools of water, trees, land, and clouds.

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Helen Miller is an artist. She teaches at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and Harvard Summer School. Michael Strand is a professor in Sociology at Brandeis University.