John Linnell

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In 1815 Linnell spent about a month in the village of Winkfield near Windsor, from where he made sketching trips into the Forest. This painting was based on a smaller one he exhibited in 1816 and which presumably was made on or after such a visit. Woodcutters at work or at rest appear in a number of his works from this period. Linnell was not able to devote much of his time to landscape, however, until the 1840s. Economic necessity forced him to be a portrait painter: 'portraits I painted to live,' he recalled, 'but I lived to paint poetical landscape'.

Gallery label, September 2004

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