Julius Caesar Ibbetson
1759-1817
Julius Caesar Ibbetson was an English painter of small-scale landscapes and rural scenes with figures and animals, mainly of his native Yorkshire. Benjamin West called him ‘the Berchem of England’.
His unusual Christian names were given to him because of his Caesarian birth. Ibbetson spent most of his life in Yorkshire, but worked also for a time in London and the Lake District.
He failed to develop a style of his own but was successful in imitating and even forging other artists. In the late 1770s he worked in London on copies and forgeries of Dutch 17th-century landscapists, which prompted his nickname ‘the Berchem of England’. He also produced copies after the leading contemporary English artists, such as Thomas Gainsborough and Richard Wilson. Ibbetson’s theatrical scenes painted for John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery in London were executed in the manner of Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg.
In 1789 he traveled to Java and the landscapes produced there are a digression from his topographical views of Yorkshire and the Lake District, as are the various pictures he painted (a few being engraved) of high-spirited ‘jack tars’ causing mayhem ashore. Of these, the National Maritime Museum’s ‘Sailors carousing in the Long Room at Portsmouth’ (1802) is a fairly restrained example. Apart from oil, his media included watercolor and etching.
In 1803 he published the treatise ‘Painting in Oil’. It demonstrates his masterly knowledge of painting techniques and is rich in insights into his own methods, one of which was modeling through ‘inner light’ achieved through application of thin glazes.
