Oils on canvas, 17½"x11½", signed & dated 1880. Bears inscription verso of title, artist's address and No.1. This painting by Thomas Barrett is one of the most interesting Staithes Group pictures we have ever found. It the earliest we have seen of a painting in the Staithes area by a Staithes Group artist, three years before the railway made the village readily accessible. We can't locate it precisely and believe the buildings shown are no longer standing. The cliff looks like Penny Nab and the lady on the balcony appears to be wearing a Staithes Bonnet. There is a typical fish barrel in the picture. Barrett was one of the founders of the Group, owning a cottage in Staithes and encouraging the young Laura Johnson to go to Staithes to paint.
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Thomas Barrett: oils on re-lined canvas, 19½"x23½",signed. A very strong painting in true Staithes style with a real sense of modernity in the subtle colours of peeling paint and weathered floats. SOLD
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Oils on re-lined canvas, 19½"x23½",signed by Thomas Barrett. A typical Staithes scene, with the intense blue sky which so often surprises visitors to the village. Note the reddish brown of the nets coloured during the caulking process where the are preserved in the biled pulp from a type of acacia tree.
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THOMAS BARRETT ARE NSA 1845 – 1924

Barrett was born in Nottingham and continued to live there becoming Second Master at the City’s School of Art, where he would almost certainly have taught the then Laura Johnson, Harold Knight and John Bowman. All the evidence I have found points to him as the founding father of the Staithes Group.

He rented a summer cottage in Staithes for many years and was the person who told the young Laura Johnson, ‘Staithes is the place to go! There is no place like it on all the coast for painting’.

As well as being an oil painter and watercolourist, Barrett was an etcher and engraver.It is perhaps for his etchings and engravings that he is best known, and he exhibited mezzotints at the Staithes Art Club. These are created by stippling the plate with a tool called a rocker which gives a blanket series of indentations which would give an over-all print of dense black when inked. Lighter areas are then scraped with a burnishing plate. A maximum of a hundred impressions of a mezzoprint can be taken from a plate.

Barrett was also an accomplished painter in oils and worked in the typical
impressionist style favoured by the Staithes Group artists. A painting which we have found dated 1880 locates him on the North Yorkshire coast as early as 1880, pre-dating the advent of the railway and indicating him as the founding father of the Staithes Group.

His work is represented in the collections of the Castle Museum, Nottingham and the Pannett Art Gallery and Museum, Whitby. He was elected an associate of the Nottingham Society of Artists in 1881, of the Royal Society of Painters, Etchers and Engravers in 1887 and as Treasurer of the Staithes Art club in 1901. He
exhibited at Leeds City Art Gallery, Nottingham City Art Gallery, the Royal Society of British Artists, the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers and the Staithes Art Club.


Bibliography:
Staithes Group Centenary Exhibition, Rosamund Jordan 200.
The Staithes Group, Peter Phillips, Phillips and Sons 1993
Oil Paint and Grease Paint Laura Knight, Pub. Penguin 1936
The Dictionary of British Artists 1880 – 1940, J. Johnson & A. Greutzner, Antique
Collectors’ Club, Woodbridge 1976


© Rosamund Jordan 2007