Julius Caesar Ibbetson was born at Farnley Moor, Leeds on 29 December 1759. He was the second child of Richard Ibbetson, a Yorkshire clothier. According to his Memoir, his mother had a fall on ice and went into labour prematurely, causing him to be delivered by caesarean section and resulting in a middle name he attempted to hide all his life. Ibbetson was probably educated in a local Moravian community and then by Quakers in Leeds. According to James Mitchell in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the ‘unusual thoroughness’ of his education ‘is reflected in the fluent prose, both of his published painting manuals and of his regular, often entertaining, and rewarding correspondence with patrons’. Ibbetson was apprenticed to John Fletcher, a ship painter in Hull, from 1772 to 1777. He then moved to London, where for the next ten years, he was primarily a picture restorer for the dealer Clarke of Leicester Fields. In 1782 wrote an account of his life and sent it to the artist Benjamin West which was transcribed by Joseph Farington in 1805. Around 1780, Ibbetson married his first wife, Elizabeth. In 1785, Ibbetson began exhibiting at the RA, with his View of North Fleet. Mitchell calls George Biggin (1783), which is one of Ibbetson’s earliest known works, ‘an accomplished full-length portrait in the Gainsborough tradition, [which] should be considered as a milestone in the development of an artist who was entirely self-taught’. Through the efforts of Captain William Baillie in 1787, Ibbetson was appointed draughtsman to Colonel Charles Cathcart on Lord McCartney’s famous embassy to Peking, a voyage that included visits to Madeira, the Cape of Good Hope and Java. He produced made many watercolour drawings of the animals and plants on the journey. While he was away, his Ascent of George Biggin, esq. from St George’s Fields, June 29th 1785 was exhibited at the Royal Academy to critical and popular acclaim. In 1789 Ibbetson went to visit the Viscount Mountstuart at Cardiff Castle in Wales. He spent decades drawing the scenery there and, according to Mitchell, ‘his detailed watercolours of iron furnaces, coal staithes, and copper mines foreshadow the work of Joseph Wright of Derby and J M W Turner and constitute an important record of the early industrial developments in that region, but are less well known than his more numerous scenes of folk life and picturesque scenery.’ After a visit to the Isle of Wight in 1790, he began painting shipwrecks and smugglers. He painted occasional portraits throughout his career. David Murray, 2nd Earl of Mansfield, and his wife commissioned Ibbetson to decorate Kenwood House, in 1794. That distracted him from the death of his wife and the workload of caring for their three children. His wife’s death ‘provoked a minor nervous breakdown, exacerbated by near destitution’, but the Kenwood project relieved the stress. In straitened circumstances, Ibbetson moved in 1798 to Liverpool to work for Thomas Vernon. From that year, until his death he lived in the north, at Edinburgh, Rosslyn and the Lake District, finally settling at Masham, in North Yorkshire in 1805. He was also an accomplished figure draughtsman and social observer: he showed four humorous paintings of sailors at the RA in 1800, a topical theme at the height of the Napoleonic Wars. In 1799 he was unsuccessful in his attempt to be elected ARA. In 1801 he married his second wife, Bella Thompson, and moved to Ambleside in Cumbria. Ibbetson acquired several generous patrons in Liverpool and in Edinburgh: William Roscoe, Sir Henry Nelthorpe, and the Countess of Balcarress. The last prompted him to write and publish his instruction manual An Accidence, or Gamut, of Painting in Oil (1803). In 1803, he met the Yorkshire philanthropist William Danby and in 1805 moved to Masham to be near him. The remaining years were the most settled of his life. Ibbetson died on 13 October 1817 and was buried in the churchyard of St Mary’s at Masham. The great American painter Benjamin West described Ibbetson as the ‘Berchem of England’ in recognition of his debt to the Dutch 17th century landscape painters. Ibbetson’s finest achievement was in his highly individual watercolours: blue-toned and delicate, they are characterised by astutely balanced elements of landscape, atmosphere and human incident. According to Mitchell, ‘his watercolours are prized for their delicacy and sureness of line’. Many were engraved for projects such as John Church’s A Cabinet of Quadrupeds and John Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery. He died on 13 October 1817. His eldest son, Julius Caesar Ibbetson the Younger (1783–1825) was a drawing-master and innkeeper at Richmond, North Yorkshire. In 2008 it was announced that one of his works in the British Government Art Collection was missing, believed stolen. That collection comprises some 13,500 works of art dating from the 16th century to the present day and includes some of the world’s greatest artists. It receives an annual grant of £500,000, of which about half is spent buying and commissioning art to send to foreign missions to ‘show the vibrancy and variety of British artistic life and heritage’. The collection has never been valued, but has been estimated to be worth at least £100 million.