This book is the first modern study of James Barry, the finest of all British painters in the “grand manner.” Born in Cork, Barry settles in London in 1771 after five years of study in France and Italy financed by Edmund Burke.  He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1773 and appointed professor of painting nine years later.  In 1799, however, after fiercely denouncing its policies, he became the first and only artist to be expelled from the Academy.  His paintings include several that rank with the nest contemporary work, and his murals at the Royal Society of Arts form perhaps the most important cycle of history paintings in Great Britain. Although history painting was theoretically the most exalted of artistic genres, it had traditionally received little support in England, where portraiture and landscape dominated.  In the face of indifferent patronage, Barry struggles to establish an art worthy of the noble heritage of classical Greece and Renaissance Italy.  He passionately believed in art’s mission to instruct, and to this end he saw himself as an embattled spokesman for social, political and religious reform.William Pressly reveals the degree to which Barry’s view of his role shaped the character of his art and examines how his works, through rooted in traditional sources, creatively depart in both form and content from conventional academic practice.  He also assesses the artist as a portrait painter, including his use of portraiture within the context of historical subjects, and as one of the few late eighteenth-century British painters to work as an original printmaker.  The book contains the first complete catalogue of Barry’s paintings and of his surviving drawings and prints.William L. Pressly is associate professor of the history of art at Yale University.Published for the Paul Mellon Center for Studies in British Art.

The Life and Art of James Barry (Studies in British Art)

Arts & Photography

Pressly, William L.

History & Criticism

Paul Mellon Centre

William Pressly presents for the first time a close analysis of two important, neglected paintings, arguing that they are among the most extraordinary works of art devoted to the French Revolution. Johan Zoffany's Plundering the King's Cellar at Paris, August 10, 1792, and Celebrating over the Bodies of the Swiss Soldiers, both painted in about 1794, represent events that helped turn the English against the Revolution. Pressly places both paintings in their historical context―a time of heightened anti-French hysteria―and relates them to pictorial conventions: contemporary history painting, the depiction of urban mobs in satiric and festival imagery, and Hogarth's humorous presentation of modern moral subjects, all of which Zoffany adopted and reinvented for his own purposes. Pressly relates the paintings to Zoffany's status as a German-born Catholic living in Protestant England and to Zoffany's vision of revolutionary justice and the role played by the sansculottes, women, and blacks. He also examines the religious dimension in Zoffany's paintings, showing how they broke new ground by conveying Christian themes in a radically new format. Art historians will find Pressly's book of immense value, as will cultural historians interested in religion, gender, and race.

The French Revolution as Blasphemy: Johan Zoffany's Paintings of the Massacre at Paris, August 10, 1792 (Volume 6) (The Discovery Series)

University of California Press

Bringing into relief the singularity of Barry's unswerving commitment to his vision for history painting despite adverse cultural, political and commercial currents, these essays on Barry and his contemporaries offer new perspectives on the painter's life and career. Contributors, including some of the best known experts in the field of British eighteenth-century studies, set Barry's works and writings into a rich political and social context, particularly in Britain. Among other notable achievements, the essays shed new light on the influence which Barry's radical ideology and his Catholicism had on his art; they explore his relationship with Reynolds and Blake, and discuss his aesthetics in the context of Burke and Wollstonecraft as well as Fuseli and Payne Knight. The volume is an indispensable resource for scholars of eighteenth-century British painting, patronage, aesthetics, and political history.

James Barry, 1741–1806: History Painter

Reference

Routledge

This book examines the first generation of artists in Britain to define themselves as history painters, attempting what then was considered to be art's most exalted category. Seizing on the new critical discourse of original genius as championed in new books such as Edward Young's Conjectures on Original Composition of 1759, they rejected tradition in favor of looking to "the god within." In reconfiguring the nature of history painting, they went on to redefine the role of the artist as well. In doing so, they heralded the beginnings of the Romantic movement.

The Artist as Original Genius: Shakespeare's "Fine Frenzy" in Late Eighteenth-Century British Art (Studies in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-century Art and Culture)

UNKNO

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The Formative years at Atlanta's Westminster Schools

McGuire Pub. Co

This book examines the first generation of artists in Britain to define themselves as history painters, attempting what then was considered to be art's most exalted category. These ambitious artists, including John Hamilton Mortimer, Henry Fuseli, Alexander and John Runciman, James Barry, James Jefferys, George Romney, John Flaxman, and William Blake, most of whom were born in the 1740s and 60s, were presented with the challenge of how best to compete with the continental old masters when they had only an impoverished native tradition on which to build. They cultivated the concept of the artist as an original genius, a psychological strategy born out of deep-seated anxiety. At the core of this identity formation was the artists' perception of William Shakespeare, whom they recast as the original genius incarnate. They strove to accomplish in art what they perceived he had accomplished in literature. Theseus's lines in A Midsummer Night's Dream, 'The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy' (V.i.12) personified for them the Shakespeare of their imagining, and this conception of fine frenzy became the touchstone for their artistic identities, profoundly influencing both their lives and their art. This book pays special attention to their self-portraits in which they proclaim this new identity, one that emphasizes the impassioned and extravagant nature of their personal vision and their claims to original genius. The book includes more than 120 black-and-white illustrations.

The Artist as Original Genius: Shakespeare's 'Fine Frenzy' in Late Eighteenth-Century British Art (Studies in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth- Century Art and Culture)

University of Delaware Press

Between 1777 and 1784, the Irish artist James Barry (1741-1806) executed six murals for the Great Room of the [Royal] Society of Arts in London. This book is the first to offer an in-depth analysis of these remarkable paintings. Barry insisted on, and received, complete control over his subject matter, the first time in the history of Western art that the patron of a large, impressive interior agreed to such a demand. The artist required autonomy in order to present his personal vision, which encompasses a rich and complex surface narrative as well as a hidden meaning that has gone unperceived for 230 years. Ultimately, as this book seeks to show, the artist intended his paintings to engage the public in a dialogue that would utterly transform British society in terms of its culture, politics, and religion. In making this case, the book brings this neglected series into the mainstream of discussions of British art of the Romantic period, revealing the intellectual profundity invested in the genre of history painting and re-evaluating the role Christianity played in Enlightenment thought.

James Barry's Murals at the Royal Society of Arts: Envisioning a New Public Art

Cork University Press

John Singleton Copley is well known in America as the creator of the finest portraits of the Colonial era. Less well known is the fact that he left America in 1774, when the impending armed struggle between the Colonies and England threatened to destroy his livelihood, and settled in London to pit himself ambitiously against the Old Masters and the English giants of the day. Copley's English career was long and brilliant - and represents the most important period of his working life. During the forty-one years he spent in England, Copley created his great masterpieces of history painting and portraiture that stand as key monuments of British painting.From the earliest days of his career in London Copley realized that he would have to do everything possible to stand out in a crowded field of painters and create works that would bring him instant notice. This he did with his first great English picture, The Copley Family (1776-77) and, even more dramatically, with the landmark Watson and the Shark (1778). He quickly mastered the elements of the fashionable English style of painting, exchanging the tight and linear handling of the Colonial period for one more fluid and expressive. By the 1780s Copley was reckoned one of the most important painters working in England, a clear rival to his compatriot Benjamin West. With his masterpiece, The Death of Major Pierson (1784), Copley assumed a place of primacy in the field of history painting.While William L. Pressly gives a balanced, up-to-date exposition of Copley's English career, Emily Ballew Neff examines his masterpiece, The Death of Major Pierson, in particular detail, and is the author of the catalogue of his major English works. This is a long overdue study of this important painter.

John Singleton Copley in England

Neff, Emily Ballew

Merrell Pub Ltd

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