Robert Barnes was an English painter and illustrator.
He was born in 1850, and educated at St. Thomas’s Charterhouse, at Leighs School of Art, Newman Street, and under Mr. W. L. Thomas, to whom he was apprenticed in 1856.

The illustrations to "Margaret Denzil’s History" in Cornhill were his first published work, and he first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1873.

Three years later he became an Associate of the Royal Water-Colour Society. His work met with recognition at the Edinburgh Exhibition, 1886, and the Adelaide Exhibition, 1887.