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Overview
Joseph Vincent Barber (1788-1838), known as Vincent Barber, was a landscape painter and art teacher, and the second son of the artist Joseph Barber (see one of his watercolours in our collection here). Born in Birmingham, Barber was trained at his father’s school, the running of which he inherited from his father after his death in 1811. Together with his older brother Charles Vincent Barber and the artist Samuel Lines, Barber also established a new school of life drawing in 1809, which eventually evolved into the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists and Birmingham School of Art.
He retired as a drawing master in 1837 and spent some time travelling in Italy, where he died of malaria in the following year.¹
Despite its small size, Mountain torrent is an excellent example of the British landscape tradition engaging with concepts of the Sublime. Such landscapes aimed to represent the beauty and power of nature through dramatic and often terrifying devices such as storms, volcanoes, or avalanches. In this case, the small group of travellers settled down with a campfire on the left are seemingly unconcerned by or unaware of the raging torrent beneath them, which has already had devastating effects: on the far bank, several trees have snapped under the force of the water.
¹ ‘View of Aston Hall from the Staffordshire Pool’ from Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, https://www.bmagic.org.uk/objects/1946P41/ (date of access 31/05/2023)
Further reading:
Burke, Edmund (1767), Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 5th edition, London: J. Dodsley.
Mallalieu, H.L. (1986), The Dictionary of British Watercolour Artists up to 1920: Volume I – The Text, 2nd edition, Suffolk: Antique Collectors’ Club.