1824
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Dominant colour
Landscape with Cottage (recto) is a 1824 by Thomas Monro, a Romanticism work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
A small cottage sits in a misty English valley, trees bending over it like tired friends. The whole scene is drawn in soft gray ink, as if the artist used a damp brush to blur the edges. Monro wasn’t a full-time painter—he was a doctor who loved art enough to copy Gainsborough’s quiet country views in his spare time. The back of the paper is covered with quick, funny sketches, maybe by different hands, as if the sheet was passed around a kitchen table. If you like these moody English scenes, look up subject: england, 18th century.
Dr. Thomas Monro is best known as a patron who exercised significant influence in the London art world in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, but he was also an amateur artist and competent follower of Thomas Gainsborough. The physician’s drawings were monochromatic, done in wash with additions of charcoal, chalk, or india ink in emulation of Gainsborough’s moody rural views. On the verso of the drawing is a mise-en-page of caricatures and a hillside—perhaps whimsically drawn by multiple artists at one of the doctor’s salons.
Dr. Thomas Monro established what became known as an "Academy," where artists gathered in the evenings to draw, at his home overlooking the Thames.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Thomas Monro (1759–1833) was a British art collector and patron. He was Principal Physician of the Bethlem Royal Hospital and one-time consulting physician to George III.
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