By all accounts, the Cork-born Barry was a difficult man to get close to. Like Nollekens, those who did often found their friendship rewarded with a disregard bordering on callousness. Even his patron, Edmund Burke, the Irishman who funded Barry’s Italian travels for five years, had a hard time ignoring some of his protégé’s more irrational statements, once determinedly writing to him: “I do not mean to quarrel with you, Mr Barry; I do not quarrel with my friends.”
In Rome to study the art of ancient Greece, and the work of Michelangelo, Raphael and Titian, Barry was a talented twentysomething bursting with promise. He was on a mission to unite the qualities of Renaissance and classical art in a form of contemporary history painting he believed could change the world. “Our art has the glory of being a moral art, with extensive means, peculiarly universal, and applicable to all ages and nations, to the improvement and deepest interests of society,” he declared to the Royal Academy. The Crawford gallery’s survey of Barry’s work marks the 200th anniversary of the painter’s death, while an international symposium is to be held next month in Cork and London.
Barry began his career with a soaring ambition that never quite left him. He ended up in abject poverty, confined to one room of a house in London, where children threw stones that shattered his front windows. The artist worked there until his death, increasingly showing signs of the paranoia that had haunted him since his twenties.
The key aspects of Barry’s life and work are of the kind that excite art historians: his patriotism; his political ideals; the debates he inspired about the wider significance of art; the fact that he was an Irish-born artist elected professor of painting at London’s Royal Academy; and the controversial path of his career there. But what many people attending the Crawford’s vast show will want to know is simple and twofold: who was Barry and was he any good? The exhibition does an admirable job of answering the first question, but conspicuously avoids the second. With three floors containing more than 170 works, the longer the viewer spends looking, the more it becomes apparent that, although driven by a certain kind of passion, Barry’s artistic achievements were varied and patchy.
It’s easy to see what Barry, despite his unreasonable disposition, had in abundance: determination, dedication, self-belief and the support of a few loyal fans. It’s more difficult to put a finger on what he was missing, but he was certainly missing something. Perhaps it is simply that his driving passion was of a more cerebral than heartfelt kind. In other words, his work, more often than not, lacks soul.
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While he was undeniably prolific — like a musician who plays all the right notes but whose performance lacks a spark — Barry’s competence always stops just short of genius.
His career peaked with the series of six murals he created for the Royal Society of Arts in London between 1777 and 1784, represented at the Crawford by large photographic reproductions, by which they cannot and should not be judged. A large number of etchings and engravings reveal his late-discovered and significant talent as a printmaker.
The very comprehensiveness of the exhibition highlights Barry’s weaknesses. Apart from the murals, it includes all his known oil paintings, bar one, even stretching to his earliest exhibited work, the severely fire-damaged Baptism of the King of Cashel by St Patrick.
What it reveals overall is that, despite his lofty ideals, Barry was at his best with more personal subject matter. His drawings, which range from the cartoonish to the utterly convincing, are among the highlights of the show. A fascinating series of self-portraits offers evidence of his lifelong spiral towards debilitating melancholia and mistrust.
The self-portraits begin in 1767 with a fresh-faced young man full of confidence. They continue nine years later with a double portrait in which Burke, in the character of Ulysses, raises a finger of caution to the impetuous artist. They end with works dating from 1780 to the years before Barry’s death, in which bags of skin bulge under a pair of dead- looking eyes, and the artist’s demeanour goes from pensive to morose, addled, bitter and confused.
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Barry’s sense of persecution was understandably enhanced by some particularly vicious criticism of his work and his eventual expulsion from the Royal Academy. Throughout his life, however, he appears to have been his own worst enemy. Although his lectures to academy students sometimes met with rapturous applause, they were highly critical of the president, Sir Joshua Reynolds, who was often in the audience.
Barry’s bull-headedness was also evident in his determination to carve a career in the distinctly unfashionable genre of neoclassical history painting. The bulk of his output, and the focus of his ambition, lay here. As it happens, these are among the least compelling works in the Crawford show. His Temptation of Adam, with its chinless, fawning Eve and bewildered-looking Adam, the patchy pink flesh of his Venus Rising from the Sea, and the contrived sexual tension of his Jupiter and Juno on Mount Ida, all fail to convince.
Among his portraits, those of people to whom Barry was close stand out: an unfinished portrait of Dr Samuel Johnson easily surpasses Barry’s insipid Edward Hooper and two essentially wooden depictions of Hugh, first Duke of Northumberland and the Prince of Wales as St George.
Where Barry really begins to get interesting, though, is in the religious subjects he returned to in his later prints and drawings. Exploring themes that clearly appealed to his sense of persecution, Barry churned out scenes of rejection and downfall with titles such as The Fall of Lucifer and The Birth of Sin.
He also returned to his early subject of Adam and Eve, concentrating on their discovery and expulsion; he focused on martyrdom and betrayal, with images of Christ’s Flagellation, Saint Sebastian, the Feast of Herod and Judas Returning the Bribe, and he started on a never-finished plan to illustrate Milton’s Paradise Lost. One of his most striking prints, Satan, Sin and Death (1792-95), explodes with the kind of drama he often failed to concoct with his carefully planned oil compositions.
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During his lifetime, negative reviews frequently appear to have been fuelled by dislike of the man rather than by objections to his work. Today, it is clear that Barry played a significant role in 18th-century British art and that he had a notable influence on William Blake. However, Barry’s paintings seldom call for repeated viewing: except as academic puzzles, his compositions do not demand attention the way great art does.
Not that this will matter to those determined to bask in the reflected glory of this reluctant Cork son (Barry never returned to his birthplace and often spoke of his Irish origins as a disadvantage in his profession); ultimately the show succeeds because it resurrects a talent clearly deserving of overdue consideration.
Despite the painter’s alienation from the Royal Academy, he was buried in St Paul’s Cathedral in London next to JMW Turner, John Everett Millais and his old rival Reynolds. It was the ultimate honour, and one that would surely have appealed to Barry’s enduring sense of himself as a misunderstood artistic martyr.
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James Barry: The Great Historical Painter; Crawford gallery, Cork, until March 4