Thomas Roberts (Waterford 1748-1778 Lisbon)

Thomas Roberts, who was born in Waterford, was the most brilliant and shortest-lived Irish landscape painter of the second half of the eighteenth century. He had entered the Dublin Society Schools as a boy in 1763 and was taught by the landscape painter James Mannin. Afterwards he worked under George Mullins as an apprentice when the latter was working in his home town of Waterford, later following him to Dublin where they lived in the same house for a time. By 1766 Roberts was exhibiting at the Society of Artists in Ireland, where he was to exhibit some fifty-nine works before his untimely death from consumption, and he soon established a reputation as an outstanding talent whose services were in great demand especially for his topographical paintings. Among his patrons were the 2nd Duke of Leinster, Viscount Cremorne, and the Veseys of Lucan, who employed him to record their houses and estates and the improvements that so many of them had made to them.

The waterfall was a subject which Roberts made very much his own. The inspiration for this theme was certainly the famous Powerscourt cascade in County Wicklow, which was a mecca for Irish artists and was popularised by George Barret from the late 1740s.

This picture is a good example of his atmospheric style and almost miniaturist handling of trees and rocks. It is a marvellous example of his understanding of Irish light and distance with the golden-hued evening mist falling.