Rocky wooded landscape with figures and cattle by a pool in the foreground

George Mullins studied under James Mannin, the first Professor of landscape painting at the Dublin Society Drawing School, from 1756. He first found work in Waterford painting trays and lids of snuff-boxes in the manufactory of Japan- and Birmingham-ware established by Thomas Wyse. On his return to Dublin, he married the owner of the alehouse The Horseshoe and Magpie at Temple Bar, and according to Horace Walpole his wife was the sister of Hugh Douglas Hamilton's wife Mary. His work was clearly highly esteemed and in 1763 the Dublin Society awarded him a premium for the 'best original landscape painted in oil'; he was later also to win a premium for the second best history piece in 1768. Between 1765 and 1769 he exhibited at the Society of Artists in Dublin his subjects ranging from landscapes to religious and history pictures. Among his most important early patrons was the 1st Earl of Charlemont who commissioned from him a set of four large classical landscapes representing the four times of day for his house at Marino, Co. Dublin, in 1768, where they have recently returned. In 1770, like so many Irish artists of his generation, he moved to London no doubt tempted by the wider opportunities then offered there for his work, where he exhibited at the Royal Academy between 1770 and 1775. In the 1770 Royal Academy exhibition he gave the same address as his fellow Irish artist Robert Carver in Great Newport Street but he later moved to Gerard Street. Mullins continued to exhibit at the Royal Academy until 1775 after which there is no record of him in either London or Dublin which has has led art historians to conclude that he must have died soon afterwards.

The present picture can be compared compositionally and stylistically to the artist's Fishing Party which is signed and dated 1772 ( Fig. 1; The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford) and to the pictures which he executed for the Earl of Charlemont (fig. 2).