James Barry
Born Cork, 11 Oct 1741; died London, 22 Feb 1806.
Irish painter, draughtsman, printmaker and writer.
1. Life and character.
He was the son of a publican and coastal trader and studied with the landscape painter John Butts (c. 1728–65) in Cork. Early in his career he determined to become a history painter: in 1763 he went to Dublin, where he exhibited the Baptism of the King of Cashel by St Patrick (priv. col., on loan to Dublin, N.G.) at the Dublin Society of Arts, by whom he was awarded a special premium for history painting. He studied under the portrait and history painter Jacob Ennis (1728–70) at the Dublin Society’s drawing school. He attracted the attention of Edmund Burke, who in 1764 found work for him in London preparing material for volumes of the Antiquities of Athens with James ‘Athenian’ Stuart. From 1765 to 1771 Barry travelled in Europe, financially supported by Burke. He was mostly in Rome, where he moved in the circle of the Scottish painters John and Alexander Runciman and the sculptor Joseph Nollekens; he seems also to have known the Swedish Neo-classical sculptor Johan Tobias Sergel. In 1773 he was elected to the Royal Academy, London, and in 1782 he became its professor of painting, but he was expelled in 1799 for the increasing eccentricity of his lectures and for his public attacks on the conduct of his fellow members. His last years were spent in penury and self-imposed isolation, alleviated only by the efforts of his few remaining friends to raise an annuity for him. His single-minded promotion of history painting in a market dominated by portraiture, his Roman Catholicism and his Republican sympathies in the increasingly reactionary climate of British politics in the years after the French Revolution often put him at odds with his English contemporaries. Because he suffered from persecution mania (he may have had acromegaly), he also alienated many of his artistic colleagues. Yet despite his bewildering originality and rebarbative personality, he was sufficiently esteemed at his death to be buried in St Paul’s Cathedral. His idiosyncratic approach to art attracted few followers, but the subjective quality of his vision found parallels in the art of several of his contemporaries, among them Alexander Runciman, John Hamilton Mortimer, George Romney, Fuseli and Blake. He was considered by many of the next generation as a heroic rebel against the art establishment.
2. Work.
(i) History painting.
Barry accepted the challenge of history painting despite a glaring lack of patronage for this kind of art in 18th-century Britain. His conviction that modern art was in decline added to his difficulties in competing with the Old Masters: he was strongly indebted to Italian art, in particular the work of Parmigianino and Annibale Carracci. The wild landscapes of Salvator Rosa also proved influential, and in his later years he turned with increasing enthusiasm to the work of Michelangelo, an appreciation he shared with contemporaries such as Fuseli, Blake and Reynolds.
Barry demonstrated a fierce independence and originality in his choice of subject-matter and its treatment: Philoctetes on the Island of Lemnos (1770; Bologna, Pin. N.), his diploma piece for the Accademia Clementina in Bologna, was the first post-classical painting of this subject, which had been discussed in the writings of both Johann Joachim Winckelmann and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. The Temptation of Adam (1767–70; Dublin, N.G.) was the first Miltonic subject to be exhibited (in 1771) at the Royal Academy. King Lear Weeping over the Body of Cordelia (exh. RA 1774; Ireland, Kathleen, Countess Plunkett, priv. col.; see 1983 exh. cat., p. 57) and the enlarged version for Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery (1786–7; London, Tate, see fig. [not available online]) were the first works to show Shakespeare’s tragic last act, for which 18th-century stage performances invariably substituted a happy ending. In Barry’s earlier interpretation Lear’s gigantic body is dramatically compressed against the frame, filling the surface of the picture. The agitated lines of his windswept hair and furrowed face offer a poignant contrast to Cordelia’s lifeless form. The originality of Barry’s vision confounded his contemporaries, such as the critic of the Public Advertiser of 3 May 1774 who condemned it as ‘demoniac’ and ‘extravagant’.
Barry’s treatment of Classical subjects drawn from the traditional repertory of academic art could be equally unconventional. His late canvas Jupiter and Juno on Mt Ida (c. 1785–1805; Sheffield, Mappin A.G.) is a work of almost overwhelming emotional intensity. The god and goddess are tightly compressed within the picture space, their monumental forms locked together by taut, fluid contours and by the slowly undulating rhythms of hair, garments and enfolding arms. The abstract linear style, shallow, relief-like composition and emphasis on the erotic found a counterpart in France in the work of Ingres of c. 1800.
Barry’s most ambitious achievement was his series of six large murals on canvas on the Progress of Human Culture, a theme made fashionable during the Enlightenment. They were painted between 1777 and 1784 for the Society of Arts in the Adelphi, John Adam Street, London (oil on canvas; in situ). The commission was the result of an invitation given in 1774 to ten artists to decorate the Great Room of the Society. They all, including Barry, declined. But in 1777 Barry approached the Society, volunteering to undertake the task unaided. Four of the canvases measure 3.66×4.67 m and the remaining two 3.66×12.8 m. The first canvas shows Orpheus leading the primitive Greeks out of their barbaric condition; the second shows a more advanced stage of Grecian civilization with a rural community celebrating a harvest festival; while the third (one of the two long canvases) depicts Classical civilization at its height with a gathering of Greek athletes and thinkers in an idealized composite of the Olympic Games. These three paintings provide a Classical model for mankind’s advancement, and they are followed by two works, the Triumph of the Thames and the Distribution of Premiums in the Society of Arts, which demonstrate how the state of the arts and commerce in Britain might be improved under the enlightened patronage of such institutions as the Society of Arts. The final canvas (the other long mural) portrays Elysium and Tartarus. Barry’s heaven contains 125 identifiable portraits of men and women of genius who had contributed to the progress of civilization. The paintings are of uneven quality and are composed of a variety of genres: a mixture of historical and allegorical subjects with a commemorative group portrait. Yet the best paintings possess a heroic sublimity not found elsewhere in British art of the period. The series as a whole sets forth a highly complex, personal programme that lies hidden beneath the ostensible subject-matter. Even Barry’s lengthy tract of 1783, An Account of a Series of Pictures in the Great Room of the Society of Arts Manufactures and Commerce at the Adelphi, offers only hints as to his larger purpose, and the viewer must penetrate the narrative to uncover this deeper level of meaning, in which the tenets of natural religion are used to support a belief in Christianity and the central role of the Roman Catholic Church.
(ii) Portraiture.
Barry was an accomplished if idiosyncratic portrait painter. He had few commissions, and most of his sitters came from the circle of Burke’s family and friends. What he could achieve in the more conventional vein is demonstrated by the informal portrait of Giuseppe Baretti (exh. RA 1773; London, priv. col., see 1983 exh. cat., p. 70) or, in the grand manner, the full-length Hugh Smithson, 1st Duke of Northumberland (c. 1784–6; London, Syon House). The artist introduced himself and his mentor into an unorthodox attempt at historical portraiture, Barry and Burke in the Characters of Ulysses and a Companion Fleeing from the Cave of Polyphemus (1776; Cork, Crawford Mun. A.G.). In contrast to Reynolds, Barry insisted on the separateness of the two genres of portraiture and mythological painting. The figures of Barry and Burke are cut by the bottom edge of the frame, as in a portrait, and their features are depicted realistically. Their mythical companions, on the other hand, are depicted in an idealized manner. This tense polarity contributes to the picture’s hallucinatory quality. Barry’s most arresting portraits are those that focus on his own image and seem to explore his inner life in a manner rarely paralleled by his contemporaries. They include the Self-portrait as Timanthes (c. 1780–1803; Dublin, N.G.), which contains a web of personal symbolic associations, and the drawn Self-portrait (c. 1802; London, Royal Soc. A.), which shows the artist weary, pensive and disillusioned.
(iii) Drawings.
Barry’s drawings are relatively numerous and varied. Throughout his career, he sketched from the live model, creating a number of expressive, bold nudes often characterized by a melancholy lassitude. He also drew revealing portraits of friends as well as a group of remarkably intimate self-portraits, but his most important drawings are large historical subjects usually preparatory to a painting or print.
Two drawings of New Testament scenes, the Ecce homo (c. 1773) and Judas Returning the Bribe of the Thirty Pieces of Silver (both pen and ink and brown wash, c. 1799; London, BM), provide a contrast between his early and late styles. The first is a study for an unexecuted altarpiece intended for St Paul’s Cathedral, while the second is a more personal statement, probably intended for a print, in which the artist drew a parallel between his betrayal and expulsion by the Royal Academy and Judas’s betrayal of Christ. Both are drawn in a simplified, linear style, though the outlines of the flat, attenuated forms in the early Ecce homo are thinly drawn with elegant precision, whereas the Judas exhibits a raw power with thick, coarse lines, more jagged than fluid; the patterning formed by the wash is boldly abstract, and the size of the figures conforms to a scale determined by emotional factors, rather than the laws of perspective. Judas is close to the picture plane, his contorted face and streaming hair a dramatic interpretation of one of Charles Le Brun’s passions: Despair.
Barry’s drawing of Passive Obedience (c. 1802–5; Princeton U., NJ, A. Mus.) is one of his most original in terms of its subject and treatment. At the left, a heroic male nude supported by an angel recoils from a scene of horror. The identifiable historical figures are drawn from 17th-century history, but the allusion to the oppressive contemporary situation is unmistakable. In this historical composition Barry employs conventions that had often been limited to satirical art. The centre of the design is a dark, ominous void, and the figures, pressed to the picture’s edges, are cut by the frame. The viewer is further disorientated by clashes in scale, the abrupt juxtaposition of near and far and the mixing of ‘real’ figures with spectral visions.
(iv) Prints.
Barry turned to printmaking as a means of reproducing his paintings and because of his strong desire to communicate his political and social views. He experimented with a variety of media, including engraving, etching, aquatint, soft-ground etching, mezzotint and lithography. His prints, executed with crude, vigorous power, are often large, at times stretching to the limit the capacities of contemporary presses. Among the earliest is the etching with aquatint of the Phoenix or the Resurrection of Freedom (1776), a biting commentary on British attitudes to liberty at the time of the American War of Independence. Even conventional subjects from the Bible, such as Job Reproved by his Friends (etching and aquatint, 1777), or from ancient history, such as the Conversion of Polemon (etching and aquatint, 1778), became in his hands commentaries on current events. Between 1792 and 1802 Barry etched two series of plates reproducing his murals for the Society of Arts. Among the finest of his productions are three prints conceived as part of an ambitious but abortive plan to illustrate the whole of Milton’s Paradise Lost. In particular his etching of Satan, Sin and Death (c. 1792–5) has an electrifying power that makes it one of his boldest and most original images.
(v) Writings.
Barry always felt the need to educate his public. In his first book, An Inquiry into the Real and Imaginary Obstructions to the Acquisition of the Arts in England (London, 1775), he passionately promoted the importance of history painting in the formation of a great national culture. An Account of a Series of Pictures (London, 1783) offers a lengthy exegesis of his Society of Arts murals, and in his description of his prints after these paintings, A Letter to the … President … of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts (London, 1793), he continued this effort. His lectures as professor of painting at the Royal Academy (published posthumously by Fryer) were designed to emulate Reynolds’s Discourses but were hampered by Barry’s difficulties in preparing them on time and his increasing sense of persecution by the art establishment. His last major publication was A Letter to the Dilettanti Society (London, 1798), another attack on the deplorable state of British patronage. Some of its remarks addressed to the Royal Academy were used against Barry when he was expelled from its membership.
William L. Pressly. "Barry, James." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T006539 (accessed May 1, 2012).
