The landscape painter and watercolourist Julius Caesar Ibbetson (1759-1817) was born and educated in Leeds, later apprenticed to a ship painter in Hull before moving to London to work at first as a picture restorer. He began to exhibit at the Royal Academy in 1785 and served as draughtsman to the first British embassy to Peking in 1787. He acquired patrons in Wales, Liverpool and Edinburgh and by the end of his life was celebrated (in the words of Benjamin West) as ‘the Berchem of England’.

Ibbetson travelled widely throughout Britain in search of subjects. The present watercolour originates from his 1792 summer tour of North Wales in the company of Robert Fulke Greville (1751-1824). He visited Llangollen in July and there are a number of recorded Llangollen views, including another version of this watercolour in the National Library of Wales and an oil in Glasgow Museum. Large and highly finished, the foreground is animated by a group of washerwomen drawn with Ibbetson’s customary attention to picturesque detail. It is somewhat unusual in its facture: the sky was drawn on a separate sheet of paper and then attached to the primary support, carefully silhouetted in order to fit seamlessly into the composition.

John Adams Fine Art (London); purchased there by Guy Peppiatt Fine Art (London), May 2011; purchased there by the Spooner Charitable Trust, 2018; gift of the Spooner Charitable Trust to the Samuel Courtauld Trust, 2018

Julius Caesar Ibbetson - a loan exhibition to celebrate the bicentenary of the artist's death, John Mitchell Fine Paintings, London, 23/11/2017-08/12/2017

Watermark: Watermark: none.

Collector's mark: none.

Inscription: Inscribed on part of old mount (now missing but recorded in file): "From under the Bridge...... Llangollen".