Adam's IMPORTANT IRISH ART 1st June 2022

34 20 GEORGE BARRET ( C. 1732-1784) Sun Rising: An Extensive Wooded Landscape with Fishermen Oil on canvas 101.6 x 126 cm (40 x 49½”) Engraved: by Robert Laurie (Fig 2), published by Robert Sayer and John Bennet, No 53 Fleet Street, London, 10 July 1774 Literature: Taking Stock, Acquisitions, 2000-2010 , Exhibition Catalogue, National Gallery of Ireland (Dublin, 2009) p. 13: ‘a smaller but equally high-quality version of this picture recently appeared on the London art market’. € 100,000 - 150,000 One of the most compellingly dramatic paintings by George Barret, and a masterpiece of eighteenth-century Irish art, this landscape has recently been identified as a painting entitled in the artist’s lifetime Sun Rising . Here, in a work directly inspired by the beauties of the Wicklow landscape, Barret offers a magically rendered account of the moment when, at dawn, the sun emerges anew. Since the builders of Newgrange, sunrise has acquired associations with myth and religion and become richly freighted with symbolic charge – hope for renewal, re- birth or even resurrection. While playing with these mul- tiple and complex resonances, Barret also evokes with great bravura of technique the sheer wonder that dawn presents and offers us a masterly rendering on canvas of the elemental beauty of nature. The painting relates directly to a somewhat larger work in the National Gallery of Ireland, (Christie’s 12/5/2005, £512,000, approx. €615,000) (fig. 1). That the present work is the prototype of the composi- tion and the NGI picture a later reworking, seems appar- ent from the presence here of distinct pentimenti – signs of where the artist has changed his mind while working on the canvas – and also the evidence of an engraving by Robert Laurie made in 1774 some years after the work was painted (fig 2). This shows two figures in the boat in the foreground (as here), rather than single figure as in the National Gallery of Ireland painting, clearly indicating from which work it was taken. The larger NGI painting, painted on an anomalously sized canvas, is likely to have been a commission to rework this successful composition for a specific location. The print is titled Sun-Rising , and presumably was so christened with Barret’s blessing as he must have made his composition available to the printmaker to copy, or encouraged its purchaser to lend it. Indeed the en- graving is a great rarity as its seems to be the only print commissioned after one of his Irish, or Irish-inspired, paintings, suggesting that it was a landscape with which Barret was particularly pleased and proud. Fig 2 Robert Laurie after George Barret (c. 1732-1784), Sun Rising, published by Robert Sayer and John Bennet, No 53 Fleet Street, London, 10 July 1774 Courtesy of the British Museum