Landscape with cottage

This turn-of-the-19th-century oil on panel depicts a remote cottage deep within a wooded glade with a figure approaching from the right. The painting harks back to Gainsborough’s ‘cottage-door scenes’ of the 1770s and 80s in which an isolated cottage is depicted deep within a wood and female figures are shown congregating outside the cottage door awaiting the labouring-husband’s return. The overgrown, picturesque decay of the cottage in this painting, recalls the cottages of George Morland (1763-1804), however, the cottage motif in general draws upon the rich tradition of Dutch landscape painting which popularised exterior and interior views of cottages. The work is a product of the artist’s imagination and perhaps reflects, albeit subconsciously, a fantasy of how the polite classes wished to see the rural poor; as remote and engaged in retired domesticity.