Cattle and sheep at resting at the edge of a forest
George Barret, the younger British
Not on view
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.
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