GEORGE BARRET (1732 -1784) Classical River Landscape with T...

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€40,000 - €60,000

GEORGE BARRET (1732 -1784) Classical River Landscape with Travellers and a White Horse Oil on canvas, 97 x 123cm Provenance: Parker Gallery, London label verso Together with Thomas Roberts (see lot 40), George Barret is the towering figure among the Irish-born landscape painters, sometimes called the Dublin Group, who brought the art to such a notable peak in the second half of the eighteenth century. In 1778, Thomas Campbell (1733-95) noted the ‘general excellence of Irish artists in landscape’ and, elsewhere, he suggested that Irish artists had ‘no competitors’ in the genre. Barret who made his career in London and was honoured as one of the foundation members of the Royal Academy in 1768, would have provided a crucial role model for the younger generation, such as Roberts, back home in Dublin. Barret is an endlessly inventive artist and, while he never repeats himself verbatim, he enjoys ringing the changes by playing with the different elements within his landscape syntax – figures, animals, trees, water, architecture – to produce what are perhaps best seen as ‘variations on a theme’, in which the component parts may vary, but the idiom is recognisably – and distinctively – Barret. Indicating, how he composed his work by a process of continuously shuffling different motifs, which he had observed individually and sketched directly from nature, to create different, and often very varied, compositions, the present large landscape offers an intriguing comparison with a work in the National Gallery of Ireland. The left hand side of the composition of both pictures is largely the same, as large trees grow out of a rocky escarpment from which a natural cascade flows into a river. As often, here Barret’s handling of flowing water is masterly, adding a dynamic sense of movement to this portion of the composition. The right hand sides of the two pictures are, however, noticeably different. In the National Gallery of Ireland work, a fisherman casts his line, rather optimistically, into the rapids, rather than into the still pool of water where he may have had better luck. In our work, by contrast, the composition is animated by a traveller with a white packhorse progressing to the right who has encountered a rustic figure, perhaps another traveller, or shepherd, accompanied by his alert and animated dog. Throughout the whole painting, the palette is controlled in a relatively low key and with none of the chromatic highlights – flicks of red in costumes – that can sometimes distract. Instead landscape and figures blend into a harmonious and very pleasing unity, which is emphasised by the subtly portrayed, even fall of light throughout the painting. This is a classical landscape certainly, but one based on the artist’s clear study of the landscape of his native land, and, most particularly, the scenery of the Dargle Valley in County Wicklow. Barret was born in Dublin probably in 1732. Little is known of his family background except that he was born in the Liberties, the son of a clothier. At about the age of fourteen Barret entered the drawing school of Robert West (soon to be taken over the Dublin Society), which exclusively taught drawing through the copying of prints, drawings and casts. In 1747 the young Barret came to public attention for the first time when as a young student at the Drawing School he was awarded a premium for his proficiency. At some point in the late 1740s or very early 1750s, Barret received his first notable commission when he was employed by Joseph Leeson to paint a series of landscapes which were set into decorative plaster frames in the Library (now the Dining Room) of his newly-built house at Russborough, County Wicklow. The capriccios Barret painted for Leeson, if more classically inspired than some of his later works (particularly in the depiction of the architecture), are delightful and they set the tone for the rest of his Irish-period oeuvre. Through the 1750s, and particularly the early 1760s, Barret continued to develop his personal style. The somewhat schematic structural characteristics of the 1740s remain, but his paintings become more boldly rendered and enlivened with increasing success by diminutive figures that evolve from Rococo Italianate staffage to more substantial and convincing fishermen or wayfarers – as here. In the years immediately preceding his departure for London, Barret seems to have been exceptionally busy and he received commissions from the most exalted levels of Irish society. During his formative years in Ireland Barret enjoyed the patronage of, among others, the Peppers of Ballygarth Castle and the Bectives of Headfort, and painted accomplished, classical landscapes, capriccios, house portraits, topographical views and, on occasion, hybrid compositions that drew on all of these models. Barret moved with some degree of social proximity with his grand patrons, appearing, for example, in a letter of 7 December 1762 from Emily FitzGerald at Castletown, her sister’s house in Kildare, where his presence is noted in the company of Lord Powerscourt. In the same year that he was working at Castletown, Barret was actively engaged in painting Powerscourt’s famous County Wicklow demesne. Several views survive, including two of the great house, built to designs by Richard Castle, and at least four of the famous waterfall. Views of Powerscourt were among the works Barret showed at the Society of Artists in his first London exhibition in 1764. Barret had left for London at some point in 1762. By September of that year, an auction was held ‘of the furniture of Mr. George Barret’s house in Leeson Street, near Donnybrook corner at Stephen’s Green’, rather appropriately just across the Green from where this work will be auctioned. Barret thrived in London, winning honours, patronage from the great of Georgian England, and, occasionally, wealth too. However, it is for his Irish landscapes such as the present work, done when he was a young man in Dublin that his art is most admired today. We thank Dr Logan Morse, who has recently completed a PhD on George Barret, for her assistance in compiling this catalogue entry.