The neoclassical 18th century paintings of controversial Corkman James Barry were high in concept, but unfortunately not always so high in visual impact, writes Aidan Dunne
UCC academic Tom Dunne pulls no punches. James Barry "remains the most ambitious, controversial and important painter that Ireland has produced", he writes in the catalogue to the major exhibition of Barry's paintings as part of Cork 2005. Though he worked chiefly elsewhere - in Rome and London - Barry was born, grew up and began his artistic training in Cork, so it is entirely appropriate that the European Capital of Culture should mount the most extensive survey of his work to date. The more so in that Irish art historical scholarship has been gradually catching up with Barry, exploring the details of a career marked by modest ups and dramatic downs.
Barry was born in 1741 in what was then Water Lane. Although his father was a Protestant, he was brought up in his mother's religion, Catholicism. His considerable aptitude for drawing decided him against following his father into maritime trade.
With the aim of becoming an artist, he studied first with Jonathan Butts, the painter of the fine View of Cork from Audley Place. The fact is, though, that prospects for any ambitious Irish painter lay elsewhere, and Barry was willing enough to leave Cork and Ireland behind. His first patron, Dr Fenn Sleigh, provided him with an introduction to Edmund Burke.
Burke, one of the crucial figures in Barry's life, in turn directed him towards London with an introduction to Sir Joshua Reynolds and the architect James Stuart. Reynolds formed a very favourable opinion of him. Proper grounding for any artist of the time meant experiencing Italy, and in 1765 Barry set off for Europe, staying for about a year in Paris before travelling on to Rome.
His arrival in Rome, roughly at the time of the advent of the neoclassical movement, was the formative event of his artistic life. Neoclassicism is widely perceived as a reaction to the frivolities and excesses of baroque and rococo. It was spurred by spectacular archaeological discoveries at Herculaneum and Pompeii. The prospect of a novel, first-hand encounter with the architecture, painting and particularly sculpture (since more sculpture survived) of the classical world was something of an energising culture shock for contemporary artists, just as it had been for the artists of the Italian Renaissance.
In fact, such first-hand encounters were relatively slow in materialising, but information and illustrations were widely disseminated in various printed publications. The movement's great theorist, Johann Winckelmann, had actually laid down the ground rules - "noble simplicity and calm grandeur" - prior to his arrival in Rome. His writings on Greek art influenced many artists, including Anton Raffael Mengs, and Barry. The latter took up the credo of imitation of the ancients with an almost religious zeal. In terms of putting paintings together, his great exemplars were Michelangelo and Titian. He became and remained utterly convinced that, as Tom Dunne puts it, "history painting based on classical models (that is, treating historical or legendary incidents in a grand style to promote public virtue) was the only true course for the artist".
What does that mean, in effect? It meant, for example - and perhaps most famously - that an artist such as the Frenchman Jacques Louis David, who was likewise converted to the virtues of neoclassicism when in Rome, turning to past models to comment on current realities in a rather earnest way. David's first great neoclassical painting, The Oath of the Horatii, is an austere, formalised piece of picture-making, built on an armature of precise drawing, an almost geometrically severe compositional structure - and, of course, incorporating a moral, giving the clue to his Republican sympathies in advance of the French Revolution. Part of the problem with Barry is that, despite the many layers of didactic moralising that he set about building into his own pictures, he wasn't remotely capable of making a work as powerful as David's.
Nevertheless, Barry wrote to his friend Burke from Rome in 1769: "I am forming myself for a history painter."
HIS ZEAL AND dedication in this regard were extraordinary. However, as Peter Murray notes in the catalogue, difficulties of temperament and character, which were to amplify over time, manifested themselves. He became increasingly cantankerous and paranoid, convinced others were plotting against him. Even Burke, who was unfailingly helpful to him, was perplexed to find himself the target of Barry's ire. "I do not quarrel with my friends," he wrote to him simply at one point. Barry was aware that there was little appetite for neoclassicism in England, and was hesitant about returning to London. With exceptional prescience, Burke encouraged him to stay in Rome, spelling out exactly what would befall him in the English capital, based on his assessment of the painter's character and convictions.
In the event Barry did return to London, in 1771. On the face of it he had a great deal going for him. Burke, a loyal friend, was an important if controversial figure. Reynolds and others were favourably disposed towards him. He had a breadth of knowledge and great technical abilities. And at first things seemed to go well. He exhibited annually at the Royal Academy, becoming an associate member in 1772 and a full member the following year. But British patrons were fundamentally antipathetic to the kind of history painting he believed represented the function and future of art. With inflexible, self-destructive conviction, he quarrelled with Reynolds on the issue and argued volubly with the academy itself over a period of years.
He believed Reynolds was trivialising neoclassical principles by co-opting classical elements into the minor art of portraiture. There is a terrible irony here, in that Barry was an exceptionally capable portraitist, as the several examples in the Crawford exhibition make abundantly clear. His portraits are vivid descriptions of character and suggest real empathy and insight, despite his disparagement of the whole business of portraiture. When his painting The Death of General Wolfe attracted adverse comment at the Royal Academy show in 1776, he never exhibited there again. The painting was in all likelihood a riposte to a neoclassical rival, Benjamin West. West's treatment of the same subject, though historically inaccurate, had grabbed attention and been influential. But it has to be said that Barry's more truthful version does not come across as a great painting.
In any case he retreated to the Society of Arts, where for six or seven years (and intermittently thereafter) he devoted himself to a mammoth project - a sequence of inter-linked murals, The Progress of Human Culture - which remain his major artistic statement. Obviously they are immovable, but the Crawford show incorporates life-sized reproductions of exceptionally fine quality. Barry worked on them out of conviction, living frugally throughout. They won favourable comment and won him a gold medal from the Society of Arts, although Dr Johnson's verdict is, in a way, telling. Impressed at their iconographic complexity, he observed: "Whatever the hand may have done, the mind has done its part." He had put his finger on a fundamental issue in Barry's work: it is prodigiously intellectualised. When you look at one of his paintings, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that he was excessively attentive to its meanings and often not enough to the painting itself. The murals feature some of his finest painting, but they become cumulatively congested with content to the detriment of pictorial quality. The climactic Elysium and Tartarus, alarmingly crammed with cameo appearances, likenesses of the great and the good, betrays the awkwardness that is a feature of much of what he did.
HIS RELATIVE ISOLATION increased over time. He was more and more vocally at odds with the Royal Academy, even though he was professor of painting there for a number of years. His expulsion from the academy in 1799 - an unprecedented event - was the end result of years of political infighting and bitterness.
In the rough give-and-take of the politics of the time, he was caricatured as a dangerous radical, though his views were mild if progressive. Sadly, his last years were unhappy. His output had dwindled, his income was meagre, he felt marginalised and persecuted.
The question of the role played by Barry's identity in what happened to him in London is intriguing. In an essay, Tom Dunne follows the political trail. Barry never seemed a likely candidate as an Irish David (an ardent revolutionary in France, at least until the arrival on the scene of Napoleon). Both he and Burke shared mixed Protestant-Catholic parentage, but unlike Burke he had remained a Catholic, though both had little time for the Protestant ascendency.
They lived through difficult and tumultuous times for Irish Catholics. The American War of Independence profoundly influenced the political climate in Ireland. Barry was encouraged by the easing of the penal laws, by the Act of 1782 which gave the Irish parliament a form of legislative independence. But Irish economic resurgence and the rising of 1798 led to the abolition of the Irish parliament at the turn of the century. Though he vainly proposed a major painting on the mutual benefits of the Act of Union, Barry soon became disenchanted with the Act's failure to address basic issues and rights for Catholics. But to describe him as a nationalist, covert or otherwise, probably overstates the case.
Barry's draughtsmanship never deserted him. He was a very productive graphic artist. Yet, with the notable exceptions of the portraits, drawing is not particularly a strong point in his paintings. Not untypically, in his The Temptation of Adam, the nude figures have an oddly pneumatic look, as though they are all volume and no substance. The formalised theatricality of neoclassicism is stagy and artificial by its nature, but it can be too much and Barry's dramatic sense is definitely on the heavy-handed side. This can work in his favour - his Juno and Jupiter on Mount Ida is a camp classic - but can also work against him. Some of his mannerisms, including the sharply tapering limbs and fingers on his (mostly female) figures, and a moon-like light, recall his contemporary, Henry Fuseli, another expatriate painter never taken to the bosom of the British establishment.
Barry's paintings are vehicles for his ideas, but the ideas tend to overwhelm the means of transport. It is not an overstatement to say his neoclassical ambitions went against the natural grain of his considerable talents. Still, he remains an estimable artist and an intriguing historical figure, and the exhibition and its accompanying publication are a fitting and informative tribute to him.
James Barry: The Great Historical Painter is at the Crawford Gallery, Cork until March 2006. Tel: 021-4907855 www.crawfordartgallery.com