Descriptive letterpress printed opposite this photograph:

SUMMERTIME, PENSHURST PARK.

“Imperial Summer in hot luxury

Reign’d like a new-crown’d caliph.  Heavy Noon,

Golden and dead-asleep, oppressive lay

Athwart the sated world.” SYDNEY DOBELL.

IT is the hour when the nearly vertical rays of a July sun fall pitilessly across the yellowing plain, steeping the distant landscape in one indistinguishable blaze of dazzling light. The leaves are motionless, the flowers droop, the grasshopper is silent in the grass, and the mower rests beside his scythe under the nearest hedge; while the herds speed to the well-known pool where the dense shade of the great trees interposes a leafy screen that shuts out the fierce beams of the sultry noon. The pool is like a pavement of crystal reflecting the shadow of the trees, and not a leaf stirs. The heated cattle enjoy the sweetness of the welcome shade, and the world of nature lies around deep-lulled in sleep.

And thus, with large, patient eyes half-shut, they while away the mid-day hours-

“On the grassy bank

Some ruminating lie; while others stand

Half in the flood, and often bending sip

The circling surface.”

Presently the brooding silence is broken by the rumble of distant thunder, and startled into attentive attitudes they dumbly gaze towards the quarter from whence the ominous sound proceeds. It is but a summer shower, and by and by the lightened air reaches their retreat, and nature revives once more as they again seek the flowery meads and rich pasturage of the open park. There they roam at will until the grey light of evening marks the approach of the time” when the kye come hame.”

Our study is not one to recall the Dutch painters, for they loved to paint their subjects in sunlight. Paul Potter, their best cattle painter, did so, and Cup loved only to paint them bathed in the sunlight of his native stream, the Maes, whose banks he never left. Gainsborough has left us many examples of his unerring skill in the treatment of English landscape composed of these materials trees, water, and cattle. Simple English life and scenery were his delight; one of his very best landscapes represents- as colour only can represent it ⎯ a hot autumn afternoon, a clump of shadowy wood, and a herd of red and grey cows driven to the watering-place.