Artist Thomas Barker of Bath. Signed envelope (c.1940)
This handwritten collector's or gallery note points to an artist who created one of the first genuine "viral hits" in British art history.
Here is the fascinating history behind Thomas Barker of Bath (1767–1847) and the legacy mentioned on this slip:
The Phenomenon of The Woodman
When Thomas Barker painted The Woodman (around 1787, when he was just a teenager), it became an absolute national sensation. His wealthy patron, a Bath coach-builder named Charles Spackman, put the painting on display in a dedicated gallery, attracting massive crowds.
The image of the rugged, rustic woodsman braving a winter storm struck a deep chord with late-18th-century British sensibilities. It became so popular that it was widely copied and commercially reproduced on an unprecedented scale—appearing on everything from high-end fine art engravings (most famously by Francesco Bartolozzi) to everyday household items like pottery, printed fabrics, tea trays, and even tobacco boxes.
The "Gainsborough School" Connection
The note correctly associates Barker with the Gainsborough School. Thomas Gainsborough had lived and worked in the fashionable spa town of Bath from 1759 to 1774, permanently altering the trajectory of English landscape and rustic portraiture.
Barker was entirely self-taught, learning his craft by obsessively copying the old masters and Gainsborough’s poetic, romanticized depictions of rural peasants. Barker’s style was so deeply indebted to Gainsborough that, over the years, several of Barker's finer landscapes have actually been misattributed to Gainsborough himself.
A Fragment of Art Market Provenance
The slip itself is a wonderful piece of art-market ephemera. Written in a classic 19th or early 20th-century copperplate-influenced hand, notes like this were typically pinned to the back of a frame, tucked into a portfolio of prints, or pasted into a connoisseur's scrapbook to secure the pedigree of a newly acquired drawing or print.
It stands as a testament to a time when Barker of Bath was universally recognized by collectors as a pillar of early English landscape art.
150mm x 100mm
R2,000
