William Ashford (c.1746-1824)

Born in Birmingham, England William Ashford was an English artist who painted exclusively in Ireland, becoming - along with George Barret, Senior (1732-84) and Thomas Roberts (1748-1778) - one of the leading painters of the Irish landscape. His uncomplicated topographical compositions, complete with their well-ordered estates and parklands, were designed to satisfy the concerns of his landowning clientele and thus lacked the romance and atmosphere achieved by other leading Irish landscape artists.

Ashford first came to Ireland in 1764, to take up a position in the Ordnance Office in Dublin. He began exhibiting a number of flower-paintings and still lifes of fruit and dead game, with the Soci...