Julius Caesar Ibbetson (Yorkshire 1759-1817)

Ibbetson, the second child of Richard Ibbetson, a Yorkshire clothier, is thought to have gained his unusual middle name because he was delivered by caesarean section. He was apprenticed to John Fletcher, a ship painter in Hull, between 1772 and 1777, when he moved to London. In 1785, he exhibited his first picture at the Royal Academy, and continued to exhibit there over the next thirty years. Through the intervention of the conniosseur Captain William Baillie, Ibbetson accompanied Colonel Charles Cathcart on the first British embassy to Peking. On his return in 1789, he toured Wales with Viscount Mountstuart (later 1st Marquess of Bute), which he later revisited in 1792, with another patron and connoisseur, Colonel Grant.

Ibbetson moved to Rydal, in the Lake District, in 1801, after his marriage to Bella Thomson, and by 1802 was painting in Ambleside at the northern edge of Lake Windermere. In 1805 he moved to Masham, in the Eastern Yorkshire Dales, an area of particular natural beauty, that exemplified the picturesque aesthetics of the early 19th Century. The present work, which dates to the artist's Masham period, presents a typically golden panoramic landscape, an idyllic setting for the rustic figures on a track.
Ibbeston died on 13 October 1817 and was buried in the churchyard of St. Mary's, Masham.