Francis BARLOW (1626-1702, English)

Francis BARLOW (1626-1702, English)

Spaniel Putting up Ducks

oil on canvas

88cm x 150cm

Price: Sold

Provenance: Denston Hall, Suffolk

Francis Barlow is best known as ‘the father of British sporting painting’. The British painter and draughtsman painted numerous large canvases for decorative schemes (examples are at Ham House in London and Clandon Park in Surrey) and was also a prolific book illustrator, his etchings for an edition of Aesop's Fables published in 1666 being particularly well known. 

Born c.1626, Barlow is thought to have come from Lincolnshire but on the frontispiece to his Multae et Diversae avian species of 1671 he is noted as 'Indigenam Londinensem'. He lived and worked in London where it seems likely that he was initially apprenticed to the portrait painter William Sheppard (active 1641-60) and in 1650 he was elected a member of the Painter-Stainers' Company, by which time he had already become an accomplished draughtsman. His training combined cutting-edge techniques such as perspective, shading, and modeling of form, with the traditional craft of sign painting. He learned a great deal about drawing creatures ‘after the life’, usually from preserved specimens.

Two years later he had a studio in Drury Lane and he had evidently already established a reputation as an outstanding animal painter when he was visited by the diarist John Evelyn in 1656, who described him as 'the famous Paynter of Fowle Beastes & Birds'. His drawings were frequently taken from life and show acute skills of observation and a knowledge of anatomy.

Copybooks allowed his prints to be used in different ways. They were used in schools to teach children about creatures found in the countryside and by craftsmen who needed reference pictures for coats of arms, shop signs, and banners.