For more than fifty years Julian Barrow (1939-2013) painted from a studio on Tite Street in Chelsea previously occupied, at various points in its history, by John Singer Sargent, James McNeill Whistler, Glyn Philpot and Augustus John, and it is fitting company for an artist whose own career carried something of that studio's cosmopolitan, well-connected spirit into the second half of the twentieth century. Born in Longtown, Cumberland, he studied briefly at the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol before working as a picture restorer, including a period at the National Gallery, and then travelling to Florence in 1960 to study under the portrait painter Pietro Annigoni, best known for his early state portrait of Queen Elizabeth II.
Barrow became known, in the words of the writer James Lees-Milne, as "a country house painter par excellence," building a substantial practice painting the interiors, exteriors and conversation pieces of grand estates for private clients across England, Scotland, Ireland and America, alongside commissions for institutions including the House of Lords and London clubs such as the Garrick, White's and the Beefsteak. His restless appetite for travel took him well beyond the English country house, however, and he painted extensively in New York, the Middle East, India and the Far East over the course of his career, exhibiting at the Royal Academy some twenty times and serving as President of the Chelsea Art Society for around twenty-five years. His work is now held in public collections including the Parliamentary Art Collection, the Hillwood Museum in Washington DC and the De Young Museum in San Francisco.
The painting by Barrow held by John Mitchell Fine Paintings, of a paddle steamer moored on the Nile, dated around 1980, reflects precisely the kind of well-travelled, atmospheric subject matter, caught with the warmth and clarity for which he was widely admired, that took Barrow far beyond the country house commissions on which his reputation chiefly rested.