An extensive wooded river landscape with a mounted herdsman and cattle in the foreground

George Mullins studied under the landscape painter James Mannin at the Dublin Society Schools. Having initially worked in Waterford, where according to Pasquin he 'worked at Mr Wise's manufactory ... and painted snuff boxes and waiters in imitation of the Birmingham ware', Mullins returned to Dublin where he married the owner of the 'Horseshoe and Magpie' alehouse in Temple bar. In 1763 he was awarded a premium of ten guineas by the Dublin Society for the 'best original landscape in oil' and in 1768 a second premium for a history piece and exhibited with the Society of Artists in Dublin between 1765 and 1769. Among his patrons was the 1st Earl of Charlemont for whom he painted four large upright Italianate landscapes for his country seat at Marino, County Dublin, three of which are signed 1768. Mullins moved to London in 1770, where he stayed with his fellow Irishman Robert Carver, and exhibited at the Royal Academy between 1771 and 1775. The absence of information regarding his life after 1775 suggests that he may have died not long afterwards.

The present landscape can be compared stylistically and in terms of composition to the set of landscapes that Mullins executed for the 1st Earl of Charlemont and also to the upright landscape attributed to Mullins in the National Gallery of Ireland (for which see A. Crookshank and the Knight of Glin, Ireland's Painters, New Haven and London, 2002, fig.177; and N. Figgis and B. Rooney, Paintings from the National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, 2001, p.378-9, no.4619).