George Garrard

George Garrard was born on 31 May 1760; London is given as his birthplace by the Royal Academy and the National Portrait Gallery, though one narrative source instead suggests Bedfordshire, a detail not corroborated by the major institutional sources consulted. He trained first under the drawing master Joseph Simpson and then under the animal painter Sawrey Gilpin, before enrolling as a student at the Royal Academy Schools in London on 31 December 1778. He went on to work across painting, sculptural modelling, engraving, and printmaking, focusing on animal subjects, landscapes, and portraits, a range of media that reflected the period's interest in documenting livestock and agricultural improvement alongside more conventional portrait and landscape work.

His standing within the London art establishment was formalized on 3 November 1800, when he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy. Biographical accounts, repeated across several encyclopedic sources, describe his death on 8 October 1826 in Brompton, London. He was 66.

No verbatim, attributable critical commentary about George Garrard from a named critic in a major outlet was located during research for this profile. His reputation instead rests on institutional and biographical record: Wikipedia, Royal Academy, and museum sources consistently describe him as an animal painter and sculptor whose Royal Academy training and 1800 election to Associate status placed him within the established artistic institutions of his time. His works' presence in national collections such as Tate functions as the clearest present-day marker of his standing, in the absence of contemporary press criticism in the sources reviewed.

Research for this profile did not turn up a verifiable, sourced all-time auction record specifically for George Garrard. A separate, later artist who also shares the surname, Peter John Garrard (1929 to 2004), has one documented auction listing, a work titled The Blackbird in Our Garden listed through Anderson and Garland (lot 715), but that listing belongs to a different painter, the dossier does not confirm a sale price or completed sale for it, and it should not be read as a George Garrard record. Given the absence of a confirmed sale in current sources, no auction figure is published here; any comparison of prices for works catalogued as "Garrard" should begin by confirming which artist, or whether the London jewelry and silver firm Garrard and Co Ltd, is actually named on the lot.

The most important thing for a collector to confirm with any work labeled "Garrard" is which Garrard is meant. Besides George Garrard (1760 to 1826), the surname is used by the British installation and performance artist Rose Garrard (born 1946), the painter Peter John Garrard (1929 to 2004), the contemporary artist Rachel Garrard (born 1984), and the London jewelry and silversmith firm Garrard and Co Ltd, which trades under that name on decorative and silver lots. There is no catalogue raisonne for George Garrard, so attribution should be checked against museum and institutional records, such as Tate, Art UK, and the Royal Academy's own biographical entry, rather than assumed from a signature or label alone. Given the thin and unverified state of the public auction record for this specific artist, any pricing claim should be treated with caution until it can be tied to a documented sale.