John Cart Burgess belonged to a genuine dynasty of English painters: son of the portrait painter William Burgess, grandson of Thomas Burgess, and brother to two further painters, Henry William Burgess and Thomas Burgess the younger. He began exhibiting flower pieces in watercolour at the Royal Academy in 1812, then living in Chelsea, and went on to show regularly at the Suffolk Street Gallery and the British Institution. His flower and fruit paintings won considerable admiration in his own day, with contemporaries judging their brilliance and beauty of execution a match for the celebrated Dutch flower painter Jan van Huysum, then still the benchmark against which English flower painters were commonly measured.
At twenty-seven Burgess married Charlotte Smith, herself a talented sculptor and Royal Academy silver medallist, and daughter of the engraver Anker Smith, connecting him by marriage into another notable family of London artists and craftsmen. Beyond his painting practice, he authored two books on art technique, and alongside his flower and fruit still lifes he also produced landscape watercolours, including views made during travels on the Continent.
The painting by Burgess held by John Mitchell Fine Paintings, a composition of fruit and flowers from nature, sits at the very centre of the genre for which contemporaries most admired him, and for which comparison with Van Huysum represented genuine critical praise in the early nineteenth-century English art world.