George Barret, Sr. (c1730 - 1784). George Barret Sr. was an Irish landscape artist who is best known for his oil paintings, but also sometimes produced watercolours. He left Ireland in 1762 to establish himself as an artist in London and rapidly gained recognition as a leading artist of the period. He exhibited at the Society of Artists of Great Britain and was able to gain patronage from many leading art collectors. Barrett with other leading members left the Society in 1768 to found the Royal Academy, where he continued to exhibit until 1782. Barrett appears to have travelled extensively in England including the Lake District and the Isle of Wight, Wales, and Scotland to undertake commissions for his patrons. Barret suffered from asthma and this caused him to move in 1772 to Westbourne Green, at the time a country village to the west of Paddington. While he earned considerable quantities of money from his paintings, he has been described as being feckless'' with money. He was helped in 1782 by Edmund Burke, with whom he had become friends when Burke attended Trinity College, Dublin. On Burke's recommendation he obtained the appointment of master painter of Chelsea Hospital, a post he held until his death in 1784. At the time of his death his widow and children were left destitute, but the Royal Academy granted her a pension of thirty pounds a year. Born in Dublin, the son of a cloth merchant, some time between 1728 and 1732, Barret began his career apprenticed to a staymaker. By 1747 he had started learning to draw at Robert West's academy at George's Lane which was sponsored by Royal Dublin Society. After completing his studies he taught drawing at the Academy. He was a friend of Edmund Burke while Burke was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin. In 1757 Burke published A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, and the influence of Burke's thinking can be detected in some of Barret's early paintings, such as the Powerscourt Waterfall. A version of this painting in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool is said to have been painted for Edmund Burke. Early in his career Barret produced many oil paintings of classical scenery, often incorporating mythological figures. There is no evidence that Barret ever travelled to Italy and his name does not appear in John Ingamells listing of British Travellers to Italy. Most, if not all, of these paintings appear to have been commissioned for houses in Ireland and Barret does not seem to have painted Italianate paintings after he left Ireland. Thomas Bodkin considered that the oil paintings of Tivoli in Italy which had been attributed to him, to be more likely to be work of his son George Barret junior. who also produced many paintings with classical themes. However, these paintings can now be securely attributed to the elder Barret. A source of Barret's earliest landscape paintings came from the re-working of engravings of classical Italianate scenes of artists such as Claude Lorrain. A pair of paintings sold in 2013, came from the collection of the Rev. Samuel Madden. Madden established a series of prizes at Trinity College, Dublin, to reward agricultural and artistic enterprise, designed an important landscape garden on the shores of Lough Erne, founded the Dublin Society, and left an important collection of 17th-and 18th-century Italian pictures to Trinity College. These two paintings were based on engravings of two paintings by Claude Lorrain. One of these is after Landscape with a rural dance, which belonged to the Duke of Kingston. The second is a Landscape with Argus guarding Io, purchased by the first Earl of Leicester and still at Holkham Hall, in which Barret has reversed the image in his painting. There are a number of other Italianate paintings showing ruins which Barret probably painted before developing his series of Irish landscapes. Barret's first major patron was probably Joseph Leeson, 1st Earl of Milltown, who built the Palladian mansion, Russborough House in the southern part of County Wicklow. Richard Cassels was the architect and the house was furnished by Joseph Leeson, who travelled on grand tours of Europe in 1744 and again i n1750, amassing a large art collection of paintings, sculpture, furniture, and antiques. This was augmented by classical landscapes and local landscapes. Barret's paintings were used as a decorative scheme in the newly created dining room Many of Barret's paintings passed with the Milltown bequest to the National Gallery of Ireland in 1902.