For the Sunday before St Patrick’s Day (17 March), a poignant and stormy self-portrait by the Irish painter James Barry. The artist painted the work in 1803, three years before the end of his troubled life and four years after achieving the dubious distinction of becoming the only member ever to be expelled from the Royal Academy. The painting alludes cryptically to his consequent and abiding sense of injustice. It is also a kind of manifesto, underlining Barry’s stubborn, lifelong determination to pursue a branch of painting – highflown, allegorical, mythological – for which there was almost no call in Georgian England. The work can be found in the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin.
Barry was one of the most colourful and turbulent characters of his time. He was born in Cork in 1741, the son of a builder and coastal trader. Having conceived the ambition to become a painter, he moved to Dublin in about 1760, where he met and impressed the statesman and author Edmund Burke. Burke furnished him with letters of introduction to various influential figures in London, where the young artist subsequently spent four years working on drawings and illustrations for James “Athenian” Stewart, one of the principal instigators of the eighteenth-century revival of interest in the art and archaeology of ancient Greece. Barry, who was himself destined to become one of the pioneers of so-called “Neoclassical” painting, yearned to travel to Italy to experience the masterpieces of antique art and the Renaissance at first hand. In 1765 his wish was granted when his patron Edmund Burke helped to fund him on an extended trip abroad. Barry spent ten months in Paris and four years in Rome, writing enthusiastically back to a friend in Ireland that “really and indeed I never before...
