THOMAS ROBERTS (1748-1777)
Landscape with a Pool and Bridge, Horse watering
Oil on wood panel, 43 x 54cm

Provenance:
Mess. E. Foster & Son, 54 Pall Mall, February 1907 (as by 'Julius Caesar...

THOMAS ROBERTS (1748-1777)
Landscape with a Pool and Bridge, Horse watering
Oil on wood panel, 43 x 54cm

Provenance:
Mess. E. Foster & Son, 54 Pall Mall, February 1907 (as by 'Julius Caesar Ibbetson, 1759-1817), Sir Drummond Cospatric Spencer-Smith (1876-1955); Sotheby's, 22 June 1979, lot 71 (as by Ibbetson); Sir Ivo Mallet (1900-1988) (as by Ibbetson); Private collection, Ireland

Although painted by one of the most distinctive artists of the eighteenth century, this fine work by Thomas Roberts masqueraded for more than a century under the name of Julius Caesar Ibbetson (1759-1817) – a small but telling instance of how the important school of art that flourished in Georgian Ireland has been subsumed into, or rather appropriated by, that of a neighbouring island. Its correct attribution, only recently confirmed, can be demonstrated by a comparison with a work in the National Gallery of Ireland of very similar composition, if somewhat compromised in terms of condition (William Laffan and Brendan Rooney, Thomas Roberts, Landscape and Patronage in 18th-Century Ireland, 2009, 380-81). In both, and a third related work, figures – or here a single woman – cross a precariously spindly bridge; trees sprout from a rocky outcrop shrouded in shadows while, on the left, the landscape opens up to the distance. There are noticeable differences, however, between this and the NGI painting. Instead of two horses at the water’s edge, in the present work Roberts introduces the rather more successful motif of a horse with a rider stopping to drink. A closely comparable motif can be found in Roberts’s View near Enniskerry, also in the National Gallery of Ireland (NGI, 4703, Laffan and Rooney, 10). The white horse is something of a Roberts trademark and here its reflection is beautifully captured in the still, mirror-like pool of water. This detail is less clearly apparent in the somewhat abraded picture in the National Gallery of Ireland. As Brendan Rooney and Nicola Figgis note of the NGI work, ‘certain details, which are recognisably Irish in character such as the ruins and the foliage, demonstrate how successfully Roberts appropriated a Continental model to suit his own particular sensibilities’ (Nicola Figgis and Brendan Rooney, Irish Paintings in the National Gallery of Ireland, Vol. 1, 2001, 408). Part of the success of the painting, which is in noticeably well-preserved condition, is owing to its unusual support of a panel of wood rather than canvas. The lustrous surface of the panel allowed the artist to bring the composition to an exceptionally high degree of finish – something at which Roberts excelled. The artist availed of supports of different materials on occasion. One of his views of Belleek, County Fermanagh, is painted on the usual support of paper laid down on canvas. The picture is housed in its original carved, gilded and sanded Irish frame of a type that has been found on several other works by Roberts and which he clearly favoured. 

Anne Crookshank and the Knight of Glin describe Roberts as ‘the most brilliant’ of the Dublin School of landscape which flourished in the second half of the eighteenth-century. William Laffan in the Art and Architecture of Ireland writes ‘In the short span of his career, Roberts produced a body of consistently accomplished, gently lyrical work that justifies his description as the finest Irish landscape painter of the eighteenth century’ (AAI, 2, 435). Born in Waterford in 1748, Roberts would be dead a mere twenty-eight years later and his work is accordingly extremely rare. His father, John, was Waterford’s leading architect who designed both Catholic and Protestant cathedrals in the city, a distinction seemingly unique in Europe; his mother, Mary Sautelle, was of Huguenot descent. After a basic education in his native city, Roberts entered the Dublin Society Schools where he studied under James Mannin. He also apprenticed with George Mullins (who had Waterford connections) and, according to an early source, was ‘improved’ by Cork artist John Butts. Roberts emerges as a fully formed, and highly distinctive, artist in two works which he exhibited at the Society of Artists in Ireland in 1769: a View of Rathfarnham Castle (private collection) and the famous Frost Piece (private collection). These ambitious and confident early works, so different from the contemporary productions of, say, Robert Carver, forcibly announced the arrival of a major new talent on the Dublin scene and the removal of Carver and George Barret to London, left the Irish market for landscapes open to Roberts and his close contemporary, William Ashford. In all, over an eleven-year period up to 1777 he showed about sixty works at the William Street exhibitions. There is evidence to suggest that Roberts painted en plein air, a highly unusual approach in northern Europe at this date. Certainly, in two instances Roberts shows himself painting out-doors and the great delicacy and subtlety with which he captures the fall of light, here, and the beauty of the limpid sky, could well be explained by his precocious adoption of this unorthodox practice. Roberts was a much more advanced, and complex, landscape artist than his restrained, even understated, works at first glance might suggest. In general, his landscapes are built up with the most delicate of paint glazes, and he eschews the more robust impasto of artists such as George Barret in favour of a thin paint surface. 

The close relationships of friendship, family and political alliance between Roberts’s patrons is noteworthy – and it seems that Roberts was recommended from commission to commission by satisfied noble clients. This helps explain his rapid ascent to the position – while still in his twenties – of the most sought-after landscape painter in Ireland. Roberts’s art could, however, also bridge political divides and perhaps the two most pleasing works in his entire oeuvre were painted for Lord Harcourt, the Viceroy, to whom another client, Lord Charlemont, was politically opposed. Roberts brought the art of Irish demesne painting to its peak in two sets of views showing Lucan, county Dublin, and Carton, county Kildare. Although he exhibited regularly and extensively in Dublin, Roberts sent work to the London exhibitions only occasionally and, unlike Mullins or Barret, did not show at the Royal Academy. Despite this, his one professional foray outside Ireland was for the enormously prestigious commission from Sir Watkin Williams Wynn for two large landscapes to decorate the stair hall of his vast townhouse, newly built to designs by Robert Adam, in St James’s Square. Roberts was paid the sum of £53 10s for the Wynn commission on 3 April 1775, by which date he was at work on his last, and most important commission to paint the demesne of Carton, recently inherited by the 2nd Duke of Leinster. However, ill health prevented him from completing the six pictures originally planned and, in late November or December, Roberts left Ireland for the warmer climes of Lisbon where he did not survive long, dying in March 1777. Two hundred years later Michael Wynne hailed Roberts as ‘most affirmatively one of the finest landscape painters in Great Britain or Ireland’ in the third quarter of the eighteenth century (Studies, Winter, 1977).

We are grateful to William Laffan and Brendan Rooney for their assistance in cataloguing this lot.

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