James
Barry(b Cork, 11 Oct 1741; d London, 22 Feb
1806). Irish painter, draughtsman, printmaker and
writer.
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.
