The Yale Center for British Art is presenting “Sensation and Sensibility: Viewing Gainsborough’s ‘Cottage Door.'” The exhibition brings together for the first time Thomas Gainsborough’s “Cottage Door” paintings and other contemporary works of cottages and cottage life.

On view through December 31, the Yale Center for British Art is the only East Coast venue for the exhibition, which features 40 paintings, 25 works on paper, ten books and several optical devices.

Gainsborough’s cottage door paintings were the first in Britain to take up the subject of cottage life. They were also among the first works by a British artist to embody the Eighteenth Century ideal of “sensibility,” which celebrated the artless beauty of nature and romanticized the life of the rural peasantry. Derived from Dutch Seventeenth Century prints depicting picturesque cottages in woodland settings, Gainsborough’s cottage door paintings appealed greatly to viewers.

A 1773 poem inspired by one of his early paintings of this subject described it as a “scene of beauty and domestic love,” while J.M.W. Turner called “The Cottage Door” a work of “pure and artless innocence.” In addition to Gainsborough’s paintings, the exhibition features works by George Morland, Peter Simon, Francis Wheatley, Gainsborough Dupont (nephew) and William Redmore Bigg.

Thomas Gainsborough, “The Cottage Door,” circa 1790, oil on canvas, courtesy of The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens.

“The Cottage Door” is displayed as it was exhibited in theearly Nineteenth Century. The work is shown in a re-creation of theTent Room in Sir John Leicester’s Hill Street Gallery, which wasbuilt specifically to house the painting. Complete with fabrictenting, mirrors and special lighting evoking the glow of oillamps, the Tent Room allows visitors to experience the painting incircumstances similar to those surrounding its original exhibition.Through this display, “Sensation and Sensibility” explores howartists and collectors in the late Eighteenth and early NineteenthCenturies attempted to control the public reception of works ofart.

In addition to the Tent Room, the exhibition features a modern re-creation of the “eidophusikon,” a small mechanical theater designed in 1781 by Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg. A Swiss artist and theater set designer who settled in London, de Loutherbourg created this miniature stage (7 feet wide by 4 feet high by 8 feet deep) in which the scenery was moved by pulleys, and changing atmospheric effects were suggested by a backcloth of tinted linen lit from behind by lamps. Scenic illusions were accompanied by appropriate sound effects and music by well-known composers of the day.

Gainsborough was so taken with de Loutherbourg’s “eidophusikon” that he created his own “peep” or show box, complete with lighting and scenery that he painted on glass transparencies. As some of the original box and transparencies are too delicate to travel from the Victoria and Albert Museum where they are housed, the exhibition includes modern facsimiles.

The Yale Center for British Arts is at 1080 Chapel Street. For information, 203-432-2800 or www.yale.edu/ycba.