Mares and a foal in a wooded landscape

Thomas Roberts, born in Waterford, entered the Dublin Society Schools as a boy in 1763 and was taught by the landscape painter James Mannin and afterwards worked under George Mullins as an apprentice when the latter worked in Roberts' home town. Roberts would follow Mullins 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 untimely death from consumption in 1778.