besides seven or eight other canvases attributed to these years. The landscapes of this period were strongly influenced by Dutch artists. The most noteworthy picture of the Ipswich years, the “Cornard Wood,” might almost, says Mr. Boulton, have been painted by Both or Berghem. The Dutch fidelity to the details of the scene in this picture was shown in two other probably contemporary landscapes of which Mr. Fulcher wrote, “They were both drawn and coloured in the open air: in one of them a young oak is painted leaf for leaf, while ferns and grasses are portrayed with microscopic fidelity.”[622] Gainsborough’s life at Bath (1760–74) was marked by almost exclusive attention to portraiture, yet in the midst of his successes here he wrote, “I’m sick of portraits and wish very much to take my viol-da-gam and walk off to some sweet village where I can paint landskip and enjoy the fag-end of life in quietness and ease.” Quin said at this time that when a portrait was on the easel Gainsborough was disposed to growl at all sublunary things, but if he was engaged on a landscape “he was all gaiety, his imagination in the skies.” He employed the intervals between sittings in studying the fine trees in his neighborhood. He painted numerous landscapes and rural scenes during the Bath period, the more celebrated ones, such as the “Market Cart” of the National Gallery, the “Harvest Wagon,” and the “Cottage Door,” belonging to the later years of that period. During Gainsborough’s last or London period (1774–88) he still kept up his interest in Nature and took a house on Kew Green that he might have a convenient center for sketching tours along the banks of the Thames, and many landscapes were produced during these years. Walpole says of one exhibited in 1777 that it was “by far the finest landscape ever painted in England, and equal to the great masters.” Another in 1779 Walpole called “most natural, bold, and admirable.” Six landscapes in 1780 he characterized as “charming, very spirited, as admirable as the great masters.”[623] Walpole’s favorable opinion of Gainsborough was quite generally shared by artists and critics, but even in his case there was but a small purchasing public, so that when he died in 1788 his house was found to be filled with unsold landscapes. This fact, and the large sums he could command for portraits, make it all the more striking that out of a total of eight hundred and eighty-seven pictures about a fifth should be landscapes.[624] [Illustration: THE MARKET CART _By Thomas Gainsborough_]