Background
Barry was born in Cork, Ireland, on October 11, 1741. His father, John Barry, was a builder, innkeeper, and coasting vessel trader between England and Ireland.
Royal Academy of Arts Burlington House, Piccadilly, Mayfair, London W1J 0BD, UK
Royal Academy of Arts.
Royal Academy of Arts Burlington House, Piccadilly, Mayfair, London W1J 0BD, UK
Royal Academy of Arts.
Barry was born in Cork, Ireland, on October 11, 1741. His father, John Barry, was a builder, innkeeper, and coasting vessel trader between England and Ireland.
James Barry's father expected his son to join the family business. However, the young artist chose a different way, teaching himself to draw by making copies of engravings. Later he studied under the guidance of the landscape painter John Butts. About the age of seventeen, Barry first attempted to create an oil painting.
At the age of twenty, Barry became a student of the Dublin Society Figure Drawing School. During his studies, he was awarded a premium for his painting The Baptism of the King of Cashel by St Patrick, one of the earliest recorded paintings of an Irish historical subject, in 1763.
Barry left Ireland for London in 1764, before going to France and from 1766 till 1771 to Italy under the patronage of Edmund and William Burke. He then moved back to England. James Barry exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts between 1772 and 1776, after which he showed two major paintings in London, in Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery. There he rose quickly in his profession, receiving the commission to decorate the rooms of the Royal Society in 1777. He worked on a series of six canvases for the Great Room. This series is Barry’s most important work, and depict scenes from the progress of civilization.
James Barry was appointed a professor of painting at the Royal Academy. This positions he held from 1782 to 1799. During his late years, he continued to paint and work as an engraver. He paid more attention to historical painting, the principal purpose of which was "its address to the mind." However, its major function was social and political, not personal. Despite being a well-known artist, he died in poverty.
James Barry was a neo-classical painter of major international significance. He remains the most ambitious, controversial and important painter that Ireland has produced. Barry was one of the most innovative and impressive printmakers of the 18th century. His major work, The Progress of Human Culture, was a series of six monumental paintings of historical and allegorical subjects, which was done for the Great Room of the Royal Society of Arts, London.
Orpheus
King Lear Weeping over the Dead Body of Cordelia
Samuel Johnson
The Distribution of Premiums in the Society of Arts
Crowning the Victors at Olympia
The Education of Achilles
Elysium, or the State of Final Retribution
Self Portrait
Commerce, or the Triumph of the Thames
John Wesley
Christopher Nugent
William Hunter
Hendrickje Stoffels in a White Cloak (copy after Rembrandt)
The Birth of Pandora
A Grecian Harvest Home, or Thanksgiving to the Rural Deities, Ceres, Bacchus
Self Portrait
James Barry; Dominique Lefevre; James Paine the Younger
Venus Anadyomene
Jupiter Beguiled by Juno on Mount Ida
Ticket of admission for a performance of Horace's 'Carmen Seculare'
Satan at the Abode of Chaos and Old Night
Bacchanale
Two studies of a bust of Minerva
Eastern Patriarch
Male nude sitting on a rock
A standing male nude holding a palm, possibly for 'Crowning the Victors at Olympia'
Study for 'George III giving the Bill to the Judges'
A bust of Pericles and a bust of Minerva viewed in profile
Portrait d'un artiste
Detail of the Diagorides Victors, from Crowning the Victors at Olympia
Madonna and Child
The Glorious Sextumvirate
The Conversion of Polemon
Ancient Greek battle scene
The Education of Achilles; Standing male in the pose of Hercules
James Barry was a politically radical person, but more in the seventeenth-century tradition, especially of Milton, whom he worshiped.
Quotations:
"We may be able to start to understand the demographics of corals."
"You have been warned against letting the golden hours slip by. Yes, but some of them are golden only because we let them slip by."
"Those who bring sunshine to the lives of others cannot keep it from themselves."
"Whoever we bring in, ... his input is very very necessary."
"Every time a child says 'I don't believe in fairies,' there's a little fairy somewhere that falls down dead."
"I've sometimes thought ... that the difference between us and the English is that the Scotch are hard in all other respects but soft with women, and the English are hard with women but soft in all other respects."
"Dreams do come true if we only wish hard enough. You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it."
In 1772 James Barry became an associate member of the Royal Academy of Arts, and the following year he was elected a full member. Because of his numerous confrontations with the academy, he was expelled in 1799. James Barry was the first, and for over 200 years the only, member so treated.
Barry was a difficult person. He was extremely impatient and often intolerant, and even made enemies. He took criticism badly. James Barry led a "solitary, sullen life," living in a gloomy, minimally furnished house, "which was never cleaned." He dressed in ancient paint-encrusted clothes and ate little. He was also afraid to go out during his late years.
