George Garrard

[1] Garrard came from a family of artists, tracing his descent back to Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (c. 1561/62–1636) who was a painter to Queen Elizabeth I of England and her successor Anne of Denmark.

[2] He studied art first under a well-known drawing-master called Joseph Simpson,[3] then with Sawrey Gilpin, and in 1778 became a student of the Royal Academy, where, in 1781, he first exhibited some pictures of horses and dogs.

[4] This led Garrard in 1797, with the concurrence of the Royal Academy and some of the leading sculptors of the day, to petition parliament in support of a bill for securing copyright on the works of modellers of human and animal figures.

[5] In 1800 Garrard was elected an associate of the Royal Academy, and in the same year he published a folio volume with coloured plates, "A Description of the different varieties of Oxen common in the British Isles.

Garrard painted both in oil and watercolours, and contributed also to the annual exhibitions of the Royal Academy busts, medallions, bas-reliefs, and groups of animals, such as "Fighting Bulls" and "An Elk pursued by Wolves", sometimes in marble or bronze, but more often in plaster.