George Arthur Fripp (1813-1896) was a distinguished Victorian watercolourist and a long-serving member of what became the Royal Watercolour Society, continuing a family tradition of marine and landscape painting that began with his grandfather, Nicholas Pocock. Born in Bristol and educated there, in Birmingham and in Leamington, he took early lessons in oil painting from James Baker Pyne before first exhibiting at the Bristol Society of Artists in 1832. In 1834 he travelled to Italy for seven months with his friend, the Bristol painter William James Müller, an experience that fed directly into work he went on to exhibit at the Royal Academy from 1838, including an oil painting of Mont Blanc seen from near Courmayeur that drew high praise from J.M.W. Turner himself.
Fripp moved to London in 1838 and was elected an associate of the Old Watercolour Society (now the Royal Watercolour Society) in 1841, becoming a full member in 1845 and serving as the Society's secretary from 1848 to 1854. Over the following half-century he contributed close to six hundred drawings to the Society's exhibitions, becoming known above all for scenic British watercolour views, and his work attracted critical attention from John Ruskin, among others. He also painted at Balmoral for Queen Victoria and exhibited at the Fine Art Society and with the dealers Agnew's. Fripp married Mary Percival in 1846, and the couple's twelve children included several who themselves became artists, continuing the family's engagement with landscape and marine painting into a fourth and fifth generation, including his brother Alfred Downing Fripp, also a noted watercolourist, and later descendants who painted in Canada and exhibited at the Royal Academy well into the twentieth century.
The painting by Fripp held by John Mitchell Fine Paintings, a wooded river landscape with punts and haystacks, exemplifies the accomplished, atmospheric treatment of the British countryside for which he was esteemed throughout his long career. Together with the gallery's holdings of Nicholas Pocock, his grandfather and artistic forebear, Fripp's work traces a distinguished line of watercolour and marine painting running through several generations of one remarkable Bristol family.