Lot 44: JOSEPH VINCENT BARBER (1787-1838)

GYPSIES, HEREFORDSHIRE
signed and dated 'J.V. Barber. 1829.' (lower right)
oil on canvas
39 x 54 3/4 in. (99 x 139.1 cm.)

London, Royal Academy, 1830, no. 214 as 'Gipsies, Herefordshire'.

Anonymous sale, Sotheby's, London, 19 July 1978, lot 78.
with Thomas Agnew & Sons Ltd., London, by whom sold on 8 April 1981.

Joseph Vincent Barber was born into a family of successful artists. His father, also called Joseph (1758-1811), was a watercolourist and taught for many years at the Birmingham School of Art and his most famous pupil, David Cox, was a family friend. The sitter's elder brother, Charles Vincent Barber (1784-1854) was also a landscape painter and watercolourist who became President of the Liverpool Academy, and all three of his sisters were successful flower painters.

Joseph Vincent also taught at the Birmingham School of Art where he discovered and fostered the talent of Thomas Creswick (1811-1869). In his early years, Barber concentrated on domestic and local subjects, examples of which he exhibited at the British Institution in 1810 and 1811, however, by the 1820s many of his exhibited works were of Italianate subjects and displayed a Wilsonian influence in their lighting and panoramic views. He died in Rome at the age of fifty-one of a fever contracted in the Pontine Marshes.

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