A mountainous river landscape based on the Dargle Valley in County Wicklow, with anglers

The Dargle River rises in the Wicklow Mountains, south of Dublin, and having formed, at Powerscourt, the highest waterfall in Ireland – the subject of several works by George Barret – it flows through the Glencree Valley before meeting the sea at Bray. The river’s enclosed rocky landscape, with dramatically shifting light effects, accorded perfectly with the nascent romantic sensibility that was developing among artists in Britain and Ireland and made it a site of picturesque pilgrimage. Described by one contemporary visitor as ‘most exceedingly Romantick and beautiful’, the scenery of the Dargle which inspired Barret here was instrumental in the swift rise of the Dublin School of Irish landscape painting, pioneered by Barret in the 1750s and 60s. Under the patronage of Viscount Powerscourt, and possibly the inspiration of Edmund Burke, Barret painted repeatedly in the area. This previously unrecorded painting is an important and characteristic example of Barret’s Irish period and is dateable to the early 1760s before Barret left Dublin for London in 1763. The Dargle scenery continued to inspire Barret and his first two exhibits in the Society of Artists in London (the following year) were of the Powerscourt Waterfall and the Dargle. Here Barret evokes the Dargle’s landscape much as it was described a decade later by Arthur Young: ‘The extent of wood that hangs to the eye in every direction is great, the depth of the precipice on which you stand immense, which with the roar of the water at bottom forms a scene truly interesting’. The Irish etymology of the Dargle, An Deargail, meaning ‘little red spot’, derives from the pinkish hue of the rock formation which Barret nicely captures here. Similarly the anglers that are such a recurring feature of Barret’s work at this date reflect the river’s reputation – then and now – as one of Ireland’s most notable sea trout rivers. The Dargle continued to inspire the next generation of artists with William Ashford, Thomas Sautelle Roberts, James Coy and James Arthur O’Connor all painting the subject so that it became a defining image of Irish art.

We are grateful to William Laffan and to Logan Morse, who is currently researching for a PhD on George Barret, for their assistance in the cataloguing of this lot.