Edited by Tim McLoughlin

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Letter from JAMES BARRY to SOCIETY OF ARTS, written 16 March 1790, at Castle-Street, London

Source: Fryer, Works of Barry, ii. 470-71; the letter was first printed in Barry's A Letter to the Right Honourable the President, Vice-Presidents, and the rest of the Noblemen and Gentlemen of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, London, 1793; it is thus a copy of the original.

The Society of Arts had been debating how to honour Barry for his six pictures in their Great Room in the Adelphi, The Progress of Human Culture, but had not consulted him: 'I therefore wished to know with what temper this matter had been carried on in the Society, and how it stood reported in the minutes' (A Letter to the Right Honourable the President, Vice-Presidents, and the rest of the Noblemen and Gentlemen of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, Fryer, Works of Barry, ii. 470).

Castle-street, March 16, 1790

As in consequence of the Society's obliging and kind grant of the 3d instant,1 Mr. Barry finds it necessary to consult some friends,2 on whose judgment and advice he has much reliance, he thinks it right previously to make those friends acquainted with the whole of the business, the better to enable them to form that judgment which it will be most conducive to Mr. Barry's interest and honour (ever the same) to follow: he therefore presents his respectful compliments to the Right Hon.Honourable the President,3 Vice-Presidents, and the rest of the Noblemen and Gentlemen of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, &c. and requests it as a great favour that they would order their Secretary4 to make out and send to him an entire complete copy, from March 17775 of whatever may be registered in their minutes or other books, respecting every thing that concerns and is connected with the series of pictures in their great room. The Secretary had before, by order of the Society, sent Mr. Barry copies of some of those papers, but as they are unluckily mislaid, he hopes the Society will at present favour him with an entire transcript of the whole.

Show/Hide other notes [why?]

1 ^
grant of the 3d instant] The Society decided at its meeting on 3 March to allow Barry to have a public exhibition of the paintings (More to Barry, 4 March 1790).

2 ^
some friends] One of these friends may have been Arthur Young (1741-1820), English agriculturalist and writer, who had advised him to tone down his temper in his 'Account of a Series of Pictures' (1783); see Barry to Young [ante April 1783].

3 ^
the President] Robert Marsham (1712-93), Lord Romney, President of the Society, 1761-93; a portrait of him by Joshua Reynolds hung in the Great Room beside Barry's Distribution of Premiums in which Barry included a portrait of him. Barry called him 'that best and most amiable of men' ( 'An Account of a Series of Pictures', Fryer, Works of Barry, ii. 335) [img]

4 ^
their Secretary] Samuel More (1726-99), apothecary and administrator, he was elected Secretary of the Society in 1770.

5 ^
1777] Barry had started work on the paintings in July 1777.