James Barry is an Irish painter, best remembered for his six part series of paintings entitled The Progress of Human Culture in the Great Room of the Royal Society of Arts. He was born in Water Lane, Cork, Ireland on 11th October 1741. Barry is famous for his works of art as well as his ‘difficult’ personality.
His father had been a builder, and, at one time of his life, a coasting trader between England and Ireland. He first studied painting under local artist John Butts. At the schools in Cork to which he was sent he and was regarded as a prodigy. About the age of seventeen he first attempted oil-painting, and between then and the age of twenty-two, when he first went to Dublin, he produced several large pictures, such as Aeneas escaping with his Family from the Flames of Troy, Susanna and the Elders and Daniel in the Lions' Den".
The painting that first brought him into public notice, and gained him the acquaintance and patronage of Edmund Burke, was founded on an old tradition of the landing of St Patrick on the sea-coast of Cashel, (Cashel is actually miles inland). It was exhibited in London in 1762 or 1763.
In the latter half of 1765 Barry set off around Europe where he lived in Rome, Venice, Paris, Bologna and Florence. When he returned to England in 1771 he produced his picture of Venus, and in 1773 he exhibited his Jupiter and Juno on Mount Ida in London. His Death of General Wolfe, in which the British and French soldiers are represented in very primitive costumes, was considered as a falling-off from his great style of art. At one point it was proposed to decorate the interior of St Paul’s with historical and sacred subjects; but the plan fell to the ground, from not meeting with the agreement of the bishop of London and the Archbishop of Canterbury.
In 1782 he was appointed professor of painting in the room of Mr Penny with a salary of £30 a year. Among other things, he insisted on the necessity of purchasing a collection of pictures by the best masters as models for the students, and proposed several of those in the Orleans collection. This recommendation was not relished, and in 1799 Barry was expelled from the Royal Academy soon after the appearance of his Letter to the Dilettanti Society, an eccentric publication, full of enthusiasm for his art but which attacked many of his supporters it. Barry remained the only academician ever to be expelled by the Academy until Professor Brendan Neiland resigned in July 2004.
After the loss of his salary, a subscription was set on foot by the Earl of Buchan to relieve him from his difficulties and to settle him in a larger house to finish his picture of Pandora. On 6 February 1806 he was seized with illness and died on the 22nd of the same month. On 4 March his remains were interred in St Paul’s Cathedral, London.
