The Collections | Highlights | 18th-century Art
Highlights: 18th-century Art
The emphasis in the Barber’s collections of paintings switches in the 18th century from Italy and the Low Countries to Britain and France and, more specifically, to landscape and portraits. Indeed, even when the painters are Italian such as Guardi, Canaletto or Sebastiano and Marco Ricci (right), their works were produced for the British market, especially for those on the Grand Tour. The collection of portraits includes fine works by Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough's Portrait of Giusto Ferdinando Tenducci, and from the French school one of the most popular works in the collection Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s engaging image of Countess Golovine which was painted during her exile in Russia. The neo-classical grace of Lebrun’s portrait contrasts with the painful realism of Roubilliac’s portrait of the great English poet, Alexander Pope from earlier in the century. The development of landscape painting and its central role in the British school is well illustrated by Richard Wilson’s The River Dee near Euston Hall and Thomas Gainsborough’s magnificent The Harvest Waggon of about 1767.
Amongst the drawings there are fine sheets by British artists such as Rowlandson and Gainsborough again, with his A Hilly Landscape. The finest prints, however, are by Goya and the Italian etcher Piranesi. The Barber also owns a small group of 18th-century furniture, mainly French. There is also a collection of Hungarian coins of which the Silver 15 Kreuzer of Maria Theresa, minted in 1744, is preeminent.