A river landscape with travellers resting on a path, a ruined castle beyond

Robert Carver was one of the leading landscape painters in Ireland in the second half of the eighteenth Century. Carver, like his celebrated contemporary Thomas Roberts, came from a family from Waterford. He studied initially under his father Richard, who was also a landscape painter, whose only known surviving picture Landscape with Gentlemen Fishing and Shooting is in the Ulster Museum, and later under Robert West at the Dublin Society Schools and had a distinguished career as a scene painter in Dublin. In 1754, when still in his twenties, Carver succeeded John Lewis as scene painter at Smock Alley Theatre, where he painted a wide variety of scenery, and then went to work at the revived rival theatre in Crow Street where he painted a wide variety of scenery for Spranger Barry. Carver moved to London in around 1769 where he was employed by Garrick as principal scene painter at Drury Lane and his work was met with critical acclaim. The Watercolourist and engraver Edward Dayes (1763-1804) in his Professional Sketches of Modern Artists commented of his 'Dublin Drop' a 'representation of a storm on a coast with a fine piece of water dashing agaisnt some rocks ... with the barren appearance of the surrounding country' that it 'will be remembered as the finest painting which ever decorated a theatre' (The Works of the Late Edward Dayes, London, 1805, ed. R. Lightbown, 1971, p. 323). Carver later moved to Covent Garden with Spranger Barry where he remained employed until his death.