George Barret
Barret was a friend of Edmund Burke (1729-1797) - and their work therefore engages an Anglo-Irish perspective on landscape which requires an inherent connection between aesthetics and politics which, like other aspects of Irish history, have been underplayed in the dominant narratives of British art. (1)
The son of a tailor, Barret was born in Dublin. He was to become a founding member of the Royal Academy in 1768, and his work was popular in his lifetime. (2) According to Thomas Bodkin, 'George Barret, the elder, was reputed in his day, to be the greatest landscape painter whom Ireland, England, or Scotland had till then produced.' (3) Despite this Barret experienced the vicissitudes of the eighteenth century art market and ended his life in relative obscurity and bankruptcy.
Logan Morse,
April 2019
[The above is an exerpt from a catalogue entry]
Footnotes:
1. For treatments of this see for example L. Gibbons, Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Colonial Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
2. E. Waterhouse, Painting in Britain, 1530-1790 (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1978), pp. 241-2.
3. T. Bodkin, Four Irish Landscape Painters (Dublin: The Talbot Press, 1920).
The son of a tailor, Barret was born in Dublin. He was to become a founding member of the Royal Academy in 1768, and his work was popular in his lifetime. (2) According to Thomas Bodkin, 'George Barret, the elder, was reputed in his day, to be the greatest landscape painter whom Ireland, England, or Scotland had till then produced.' (3) Despite this Barret experienced the vicissitudes of the eighteenth century art market and ended his life in relative obscurity and bankruptcy.
Logan Morse,
April 2019
[The above is an exerpt from a catalogue entry]
Footnotes:
1. For treatments of this see for example L. Gibbons, Edmund Burke and Ireland: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Colonial Sublime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
2. E. Waterhouse, Painting in Britain, 1530-1790 (Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1978), pp. 241-2.
3. T. Bodkin, Four Irish Landscape Painters (Dublin: The Talbot Press, 1920).