An extensive wooded Italianate landscape, with figures resting by a tomb - Forrester, James (Irish artist, 1729-1775) (My University, 2008)
A pupil of Robert West, Forrester was trained in the Dublin Society Schools where he won premiums as well as 1st prize for drawing in 1752. He then travelled to Rome where he worked as an etcher and painter of Claudean views. He excelled in moonlit and atmospheric Italianate landscapes and appears to have enjoyed some success among patrons such as the Duke of Gloucester and Lord Shelburne. An enormous amount of information exists about Forrester in the letters of Father Thorpe, with whom he was living when he died in 1776. (Crookshank & Glin, Ireland's Painters 1600-1940, p140)The present image is indistinctly dated.
Keywords: Tombs; Rivers; Art, Irish; Landscape painting; Painting, Irish; Claudean