Julius Caesar Ibbetson (1759 -1817)

Julius Caesar Ibbetson (1759-1817) was one of the most versatile British landscape and marine painters of the late eighteenth century. Born at Farnley Moor near Leeds, the son of a Yorkshire clothier, he was largely self-taught, educated first within a local Moravian community and then by Quakers, and moved to London around 1777 to work initially as a picture restorer and copyist. He began exhibiting at the Royal Academy in 1785, and his early full-length portrait of George Biggin has been described as a milestone for a painter who had received no formal training. Benjamin West called him the "Berchem of England" in tribute to his debt to the seventeenth-century Dutch landscape tradition, and his watercolours in particular were prized for their delicacy and sureness of line. Ibbetson's career took an unusual turn in 1787, when Captain William Baillie secured his appointment as draughtsman to Colonel Charles Cathcart on the first British embassy to Peking, sailing as far as Java before the mission was abandoned following Cathcart's death; Ibbetson nonetheless brought back a substantial body of watercolours recording the voyage. He went on to travel and work across Britain, painting coastal and rural scenes in Wales, the Lake District, Scotland and the Isle of Wight, alongside conversational rural subjects, harbour and shipping scenes, and occasional history paintings. He exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy through the 1780s and 1790s, and his work was engraved for major contemporary projects including John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery and John Church's Cabinet of Quadrupeds. Ibbetson is unusually well documented for a painter of his generation working outside the first rank of Royal Academicians, in large part because of James Mitchell's authoritative 1999 monograph, Julius Caesar Ibbetson (1759-1817): The Berchem of England, which remains the standard catalogue reference for the artist and underpins the entry on Ibbetson in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. John Mitchell Fine Paintings has stocked and referred buyers to this monograph and has handled a substantial number of Ibbetson's paintings and watercolours over many years, spanning his rural genre scenes, coastal and marine subjects, and Lake District and Isle of Wight landscapes. Orchard Bay, Isle of Wight, the last in a series of Isle of Wight views Ibbetson exhibited at the Royal Academy during the 1790s, was researched by the gallery as the probable uplifting pendant to his more dramatic Storm: Back of the Isle of Wight, now in the Cleveland Museum of Art, illustrating the kind of close art-historical attention the gallery brings to his work. Ibbetson's combination of picturesque landscape, coastal subject matter and lively rural incident continues to find a ready audience among collectors of eighteenth-century British painting, and John Mitchell Fine Paintings' holdings represent one of the more comprehensive groupings of his work currently on the market.