Cattle and sheep at resting at the edge of a forest
Barret joined his teacher, John Varley as a founding member of the Society of Painters in Water-Colours in 1805. The institution promoted watercolor as a medium whose subtlety and range could approximate oil, and Barret would show over six hundred works in their annual London exhibitions during his long career. He developed a type of romantic-classical landscape anchored by rustic elements such as the herdsmen that here tend cattle before a distant castle. The golden tonality echoes the varnished oil paintings of the seventeenth-century landscapist Claude Lorrain, but Barret described trees in a singular manner, mixing gum arabic with watercolor and using a resist method to create textured branches and globular foliage. This mature work likely dates close to the end of the artist’s life.
Artwork Details
- Title: Cattle and sheep at resting at the edge of a forest
- Artist: George Barret, the younger (British, London 1767–1842 London)
- Date: ca. 1840
- Medium: Watercolor and gouache (bodycolor) over graphite, with reductive techniques and gum arabic
- Dimensions: sheet: 15 13/16 x 13 1/16 in. (40.2 x 33.2 cm)
- Classification: Drawings
- Credit Line: Gift of Robert Tuggle, 2006
- Object Number: 2006.538.1
- Curatorial Department: Drawings and Prints
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George Barret, the younger
1820–42
Joseph Mallord William Turner
1843
Samuel Palmer
1856
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Henry Treffry Dunn
1867
Sir Edward Burne-Jones
1879
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