Gainsborough's "Cottage Door" and the Landscape of Sensibility

FAIN: GM-50315-04

Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens (San Marino, CA 91108-1299)
Shelley M. Bennett (Project Director: February 2004 to January 2007)

Implementation of an exhibition and catalog examining the cottage door paintings by Thomas Gainsborough and his contemporaries.

Gainsborough’s “Cottage Door” and the Landscape of Sensibility will explore the cottage door paintings of Thomas Gainsborough within the context of late 18th- and early 19th-century viewing practices. It will examine these landscape paintings in relation to Gainsborough’s practice, and the popular visual culture of his day. It will also recreate the exhibition space of one of the first owners of his 1780 cottage door painting, now in The Huntington. The exhibition will give the modern viewer a greater understanding of the significance of these works. This exhibition aims to map a new geography of our present visual culture, and in so doing to ask viewers to reflect on the nature of our own twenty-first century romance with the image.

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