Enfilade

From the February issue of Apollo Magazine:

William Laffa and Brendan Rooney, Thomas Roberts (1748-1777): Landscape and Patronage in Eighteenth-Century Ireland, exhibition catalogue (Tralee: Churchill House Press for the National Gallery of Ireland, 2009), 416 pages, ISBN: 9780955024634, $110.

Reviewed by Toby Barnard, Hertford College, Oxford University; posted 1 February 2011.

Thomas Roberts (1748–77) blazed briefly across the Irish skies in the 1770s. Little in Irish painting before that decade prepared for his sudden appearance on the scene. At that time in 18th-century Ireland, the techniques and subjects of Claude, Poussin and Salvator Rosa appealed to artists and collectors alike. A succession of painters – Willem van der Hagen, Robert Carver, John Lewis and Joseph Tudor – assimilated the conventions and demands of pastoral landscape painting, and created decorative but generalised images. Roberts, in contrast, applied these classical dressings to recognisable Irish scenes. The results, seen in a revelatory exhibition at the National Gallery in Dublin in 2009, encompass the mansions and demesnes of Protestant grandees and remoter views of the west, notably the modest townships of Ballyshannon and Belleek. . . .

The full review is available here»