John Rathbone earned the admiring nickname the "Manchester Wilson," a comparison to Richard Wilson, the great pioneer of British landscape painting whose idealised, classically composed views had established the genre's reputation a generation earlier. Born in Cheshire around 1750, Rathbone worked as a landscape painter in oil and watercolour across Manchester, London and Preston, and it was in Leeds that he took on the young Charles Towne, also represented in John Mitchell Fine Paintings' collection, as a pupil in landscape painting before Towne turned his own attention chiefly to animal subjects.
Rathbone exhibited prolifically over more than two decades, showing forty-eight landscapes at the Royal Academy between 1785 and 1806 alongside further exhibits at the Society of Artists, in Liverpool as well as London. Assessments of his work at the time, and since, have proved somewhat divided: the Dictionary of National Biography judged his oil paintings "opaque, flat, and ineffective," while praising his watercolours, worked in the light, washed manner then fashionable, as "well drawn and interesting." His work is held today by the British Museum, the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool and the former Peel Park Art Gallery in Salford, among other public collections, and a landscape by Rathbone hung for many years in the Walker Art Gallery alongside works by Wilson himself, Stubbs and Joseph Wright of Derby, direct company that reflects how contemporaries situated him within this circle of British landscape and sporting painters. Rathbone died in 1807.
The painting by Rathbone held by John Mitchell Fine Paintings, of rustics on a bridge, exemplifies the kind of populated rural landscape that earned him his flattering, if not universally deserved, comparison to Wilson, and connects directly within the gallery's collection to his pupil, Charles Towne.