In the landscapes of the Bath and London periods the labored accuracy of the early work gives place to the “landscape generalization” by which Gainsborough’s mature paintings are characterized. In these later landscapes, of which the great “Watering Place” in the National Gallery may be taken as the supreme example, there is an apparent ignoring of the separate facts of Nature. No oaks are painted leaf for leaf. There is not even sufficient definiteness to make the kind of tree unmistakable. Yet the effect of Nature is adequately rendered. The mind is conducted into genuine woodland coolness and shade. As we look we become gradually conscious of the mysterious charm of Nature herself. These landscapes not only satisfy the eye by wonderful harmonies of color and flowing line, but they speak appealingly to the emotions. Constable says of them, “They are soothing, tender, and affecting. The stillness of noon, the depths of twilight, and the dews and pearls of morning are all to be found on the canvases of this most benevolent and kind-hearted man. On looking at them we find tears in our eyes and we know not what brings them.”[625] In theme Gainsborough is distinctively English, and even within this limit his range is narrow. The grander elements in Nature did not stir his imagination. Mountains, the ocean, storms, were, to be sure, not entirely absent from his pictures. In 1781 he had apparently been painting along the coast, for Walpole comments on two pictures “of sea and land,” “so fine and natural that one stepped back for fear of being splashed.” One of these was, Mr. Conway thinks, the Duke of Westminster’s “Coast Scene,” “a sparkling picture, articulately suggestive of a single delightful idea,” a windy day on an estuary. In 1783 Gainsborough made a trip to Cumberland and Westmoreland, gaily predicting that on his return he would show “your Grays and Dr. Browns to be but tawdry fan-painters.”[626] Sir Walter Armstrong reproduces a chalk drawing subsequent to this period in which “the hills in the distance are thoroughly true in mass, perspective, and aërial envelope;”[627] Mr. Fletcher is of the opinion that had Gainsborough “lived a few years longer, he would undoubtedly have taken a new departure in landscape art;”[628] and Mr. Boulton finds in the pictures after 1783 a new tendency to deal with rocky foreground and mountain scenery.[629] Yet a few successful coast scenes and a late and certainly rather slight interest in mountain regions can hardly affect the statement that Gainsborough was, on the whole, but little moved by the grander aspects of Nature. He cared as little for the majestic, the terrible, the awe-inspiring, as he did for the trim, the formal, and the precise. What he loved to portray was the gently varied and picturesque scenery of his own countryside. He sought out woodland roads, lanes with steep grassy banks, trees heavy with foliage, tangled copses, pools of still water, skies glowing with sunset hues, or