"Many of our landscape painters have made their pictures by a receipt. Never having lived out of the metropols or seen any green thing except a pickled cucumber in an oil shop, they form their ideas upon the style of the old Flemish masters.. .Very different was the conduct of Mr. Gainsborough when he painted his landscape. The woods of Suffolk were his Academy, the trees were his models.. ..the sunburnt inhabitants of his native village were the figures which he contemplated and copied. When he painted this picture painting: 'Cornard Wood' he was not twenty years of age, but at this early period he saw and imitated Nature as she is.. ..here we see a landscape in which every tree, every bough, one may almost say every leaf, is a portrait.. ..it has the force of a sketch. The forms of the trees, the bark, the exuberantly rich foreground, the woodmen and peasants, the two asses, are perfectly English, and prove that when Mr. Gainsborough painted cattle or figures he did not apply to prints from Berghem, Cuyp, or Paul Potter, but delineated them from the figures which he saw. The picture is placed too near the eye, in a more elevated situation the distant view of the village in the background would keep its proper distance."