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Letter from JAMES BARRY to DUKE OF RICHMOND, written 29 August 1773, at London

Source: Fryer, Works of Barry, i. 240-42.

Fryer's text has a line of asterisks between the penultimate and the final paragraphs of the text which suggests he omitted a portion of the original letter.

Charles Lennox (1735-1806), 3rd Duke of Richmond, founder member of the Society of Arts (1754), a friend and political ally of Edmund Burke, a patron of the arts and a member of the Dilettanti Society since 1765. He had commissioned Barry to paint Antiochus and Stratonice. Richmond House in Whitehall had its own art gallery and classical sculptures in the garden. Richmond opened these to interested artists: among those who studied there was the young William Blake, later a pupil of Barry's at the Royal Academy (Peter Ackroyd, Blake (London, 1995), p. 27). In 1758 Richmond started a drawing school there under the painter G.B.Cipriani and the sculptor J. Wilton (Lionel Cust, History of the Society of Dilettanti (London, 1914), p. 58 and James Fenton, School of Genius: A History of the Royal Academy of Arts (London, 2006), p. 97).

Barry was elected a full member of the Royal Academy on 9 February 1773; this letter is written on the day he was formally admitted at a General Assembly of the Academy.

My Lord,

I have pretty well satisfied myself with the picture of Stratonice,1 and have laid it by without varnishing till your Grace comes to town, as something might then be discovered that has escaped me. Since I had last the honour of seeing your Grace, I have been received into the academy with all due form.2

We are to have a meeting next Saturday about the ornamenting of St. Paul's church.3 The dean4 and chapter having already agreed to leave this matter to the academy, it now rests with us to give permission to such painters, and as many as we shall think qualified, to execute at their own expense, historical pictures of a certain size, I believe from fifteen to twenty feet high.5 We also intend to set up a monument there: Pope6 is mentioned; for which, as this is likely to be a heavier7 job, the sculptor is to be paid by a subscription, and a benefit from the play-house. The placing of these pictures and monument, and all the pictures and monuments that may be hereafter set up there, are to be solely entrusted to the academy, who will appoint a committee (if I call it right) tor that particular business.

I proposed this matter to the academicians about a year since, a little after my being admitted an associate,8 and I had long set my heart upon it, as the only means of establishing a solid, manly taste for real art9 in the place of our trifling, contemptible passion for the daubing of little inconsequential things, portraits of dogs, landscapes, &c.—Things, in which the mind which is the soul of true art having no concern, that have hitherto only served to disgrace us all over Europe.10

Whether this scheme may be attended with the desired success is, I am afraid, rather doubtful:11 even I foresee some difficulties in it; but if it should not, there will be little to value in any reputation that may be acquired by art: if that which would wear well will not be worn, that which is worn, I am sure, will not wear. Indeed, my Lord, when I suffer my thoughts to wander ever so little, they bring back something of despondency with them. I have taken great pains to form myself for this kind of Quixotism;12 to this end I have contracted and simplified my cravings and wants, and brought them into a very narrow compass.13

My finances are pretty low at present, therefore, if your Grace should think proper to send me any part of the price of the picture, it would come very opportunely. I count upon six figures in it, and I had twenty guineas a figure for the picture I sold to Mr. Palmer14, of the Chiron and Achilles,* 15 which was of the same size.16 If your Grace should not much like the picture, do not take it, as I hope to have something else by your arrival in town, that you may like better, and if I have not, I will endeavour to make it. I have the honour to be, your Grace's most obedient, and most humble servant,

J. Barry.

August 29, 1773.

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1 ^
Stratonice]

Barry's painting Antiochus and Stratonice, since lost. A painting of the same story by the French artist Jacques-Louis David (1748-1825) won the prize of the French Academy in 1774. [img] Winckelmann gives a detailed discussion of the painting on the same subject by the Dutch painter Gherard Lairesse (1640-1711) in 'A Letter containing Objections against the foregoing Reflexions', (1763) in Essays on the Philosophy and History of Art, ed. Curtis Bowman, 3 vols., i (London, 2005), 107-114.

The story behind the picture is given in Plutarch's Life of Demetrius, 38; the essayist Joseph Addison (1672-1719) summarises it in Spectator 229: 'That Author in the Famous Story of Antiochus , who fell in love with Stratonice , his Mother in Law, and (not daring to discover his Passion) pretended to be confined to his Bed by Sickness, tells us, that Erasistraus, the Physician,found out the Nature of his Distemper by those Symptoms of Love which he had learnt from Sappho's Writings. Stratonice was in the Room of the Love-sick Prince, when these Symptoms discovered themselves to his Physician' (The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1965), ii. 393). For further background see Wolfgang Stechow, ' "The Love of Antiochus with Faire Stratonica" in Art', The Art Bulletin, 27, no. 4 (Dec., 1945), 221-237.

2 ^
all due form] Barry was already an associate member of the Royal Academy, elected on 2 November 1772.

3 ^
ornamenting of St. Paul's church] Barry claims that he first suggested the Royal Academy should organise the decoration of the chapel in Old Somerset House with pictures, and that Reynolds, President of the Royal Academy, had then proposed St. Paul's Cathedral as a more appropriate church ('Account of the Pictures', Fryer, Works of Barry, ii. 408). Reynolds hoped that 'St. Pauls will lead the fashion in Pictures as St. James does for dress' (Reynolds to Baron Grantham, 20 July 1773, The Letters of Sir Joshua Reynolds, eds. John Ingamells and John Edgcumbe (Yale, 2000), p. 45).The idea of decorating St. Paul's had often been mooted in the past in keeping with the wishes of the architect Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723) (Pressly, Life and Art, p. 42).

4 ^
the dean] Thomas Newton (1704-82), Bishop of Bristol and Dean of St. Paul's.

5 ^
twenty feet high]

Reynolds intimates that the decision had already been made in July as to who the painters from the Academy would be (Reynolds to Grantham, 20 July 1773); as well as Reynolds, those suggested were Benjamin West (1738-1820), Barry, Angelica Kauffman (1741-1807), Nathaniel Dance (1735-1811) and Giovanni Battista Cipriani (1727-85); see Barry to Richmond, 14 October 1773.

Barry later claimed his contribution was to be a picture of 'the fall of Lucifer, a design which I made about five years since, when the Royal Academy had selected six of us to paint each a picture for St. Paul's cathedral' ('An Account of a Series of Pictures', Fryer, Works of Barry, ii. 348).

6 ^
Pope] Alexander Pope (1688-1744), English poet, had been buried in Twickenham parish church; his monument there bears the inscription by his friend, the critic and Bishop of Gloucester, William Warburton (1698-1779), 'To one who would not be buried in Westminster Abbey'.

7 ^
heavier] More expensive.

8 ^
an associate] Associate members, numbering 20 in all, were elected on the basis of work exhibited at the Academy's annual exhibition.

9 ^
real art] History paintings on a grand scale.

10 ^
disgrace us all over Europe] Barry probably has in mind the writings of the French critic Abbé Du Bos (1670-1742), the French philosopher Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu (1689-1755) and the German art critic Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-68); see Barry to Burke [c. February 1770]: 'I am persuaded that the writings of Du Bos, Winkleman, and others, have given the world such an unfavourable idea of our people, that nothing can save us from the imputation of barbarians'.

11 ^
rather doubtful] The plan did not come to fruition because of opposition from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Frederick Cornwallis (1713-83), and the Bishop of London, Richard Terrick (1710-77).

12 ^
Quixotism] Like the hero of Cervantes' novel, Don Quixote ( 1614 ), a man driven by visionary ideals.

13 ^
narrow compass] At this point in Fryer's text a line of asterisks separates the above paragraph from the next, which suggests that either Fryer here omitted a section of the original manuscript or it was damaged or missing.

14 ^
Mr. Palmer] Not identified, but possibly Rev.Joseph Palmer (1749-1829), nephew of Sir Joshua Reynolds. The price of such mythological and historical paintings was sometimes determined by the number of characters who figured in them.

15 ^
Chiron and Achilles.*] Fryer's note: '* This picture was excellent for the classical simplicity of its composition and correct style of drawing. It is now in possession of the Earl of Buchan.' The painting had been sold to the miniaturist portrait painter Ozias Humphry (1742-1810) by 1808 and was then sold to David Steuart Erskine, earl of Buchan (1742-1829) with the title Chiron instructing the Young Achilles in the Hymns of Orpheus. [img]

16 ^
the same size] Barry exhibited The Education of Achilles (103x129 cms.) at the Royal Academy exhibition, 1772. [img] He probably took the subject from a fresco he saw during his visit to Herculaneum in 1768 [img] (see Barry to Burke, [6 January 1769] and Pressly, Life and Art, pp. 35-6).