George Barret (c.1730-1784) was an Irish landscape painter and a founder member of the Royal Academy, celebrated in his lifetime for idealised, romantic views of British and Irish scenery. Born in Dublin, the son of a tailor, he was apprenticed as a corset-maker before finding work hand-colouring prints, and attended drawing classes given by the painter Robert West. A formative early friendship with the future statesman Edmund Burke, then a student at Trinity College Dublin, is thought to have shaped Barret's approach to landscape, drawing on the ideas of the sublime and the beautiful that Burke would set out in his influential 1757 treatise.
Barret left Ireland for London in 1762 and rapidly established a considerable reputation, painting for patrons including Lord Powerscourt, for whom he completed several views of his Irish estate, and exhibiting extensively at the Society of Artists. In 1768 he joined the secession of leading artists who left the Society to found the Royal Academy, going on to exhibit there regularly, often working in romantic, mountainous compositions and occasionally collaborating with fellow Academicians, providing the landscape setting for Sawrey Gilpin's animal subjects on at least one occasion. Despite considerable professional success and an income said to have reached two thousand pounds a year, Barret's poor management of his own finances repeatedly brought him to the edge of bankruptcy, and he was saved from ruin on at least two occasions, first by a private mural commission from William Lock and later, through Burke's continued intervention, by his appointment as Master Painter to Chelsea Hospital in 1782. He died in 1784 and was buried at Paddington, leaving his widow to be supported by a Royal Academy pension; three of his children, including his son George Barret the Younger, also became painters.
The painting by Barret held by John Mitchell Fine Paintings, of cattle in a wooded landscape with a church beyond, exemplifies the idealised, carefully composed pastoral manner for which he was admired throughout his career, and represents an important founding figure of British landscape painting within the gallery's holdings, connected directly to his son and artistic successor, George Barret the Younger, whose own work is held alongside his father's.