Lot 31: Thomas Roberts (1748-1778)

A wooded river landscape with travellers on a bridge, women winnowing, and a labourer by a mill in the foreground
oil on canvas
16 3/4 x 20 7/8 in. (42.6 x 53.1 cm.)

with Cynthia O'Connor & Co., Dublin.

Thomas Roberts, who was born in Waterford, the son of the distinguished architect John Roberts (1714-96), was the shortest lived, and perhaps the most brilliant Irish landscape painter of the second half of the eighteenth century. He had entered the Dublin Society Schools as a boy in 1763, where he was taught by the landscape painter James Mannin, and afterwards worked under George Mullins as an apprentice when the latter was working in his home town of Waterford, later following him to Dublin where they lived in the same house for a time. By 1766 Roberts was exhibiting at the Society of Artists in Ireland, where he was to exhibit some fifty-nine works before his premature death from consumption. He soon established a reputation as an outstanding talent and his services were in great demand especially for his topographical paintings and he travelled all over Ireland painting views. Among his patrons were the 2nd Duke of Leinster, Viscount Cremorne, and the Veseys, of Lucan, who employed him to record their houses and estates and the improvements that so many of them had made. Examples are the series of large scale pictures of Carton Park, Co. Kildare, painted for the 2nd Duke of Leinster, those of Dawson's Grove, for Viscount Cremorne, and those of Lucan House, of which a set of four are in the National Gallery of Ireland.

The present picture is a charming and characteristic example of Roberts's detailed and delicately balanced work. In the foreground of this idyllic landscape Roberts focuses upon a typical country activity: two women are shown winnowing (separating chaff from grain), while to the left of the composition a man carries a sack of grain towards a watermill. For further information on Thomas Roberts see A. Crookshank and the Knight of Glin, The Painters of Ireland, New Haven and London, 2002, pp.146-9.

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